Table of contents

• Slides
• Videos
  • Introduction to streams, redirection, and piping
  • Common pipeline commands
  • Demo: Gradebook pipeline
  • The root user and sudo
  • Exit codes
• Supplemental Topics
  • Interacting with jobs
  • Conditional execution, PATH, and SSH keys

Slides

Videos

Introduction to streams, redirection, and piping

This video introduces the concept of IO streams. Streams can be rerouted to/from a file with redirection and between commands with pipes.

Common pipeline commands

This video introduces the commands grep, cut, sort, and uniq, which are particularly helpful in piping.

Demo: Gradebook pipeline

This video goes through an example of constructing a pipeline to process a gradebook. We see how to combine the commands introduced previously to determine the frequency of assigned letter grades in the example data.

The root user and sudo

This video introduces the root user and the (possibly destructive) power it has. Using super user abilities, this video also demonstrates how to modify kernel parameters on-the-fly via the sysfs.

Exit codes

This video discusses process exit codes. Exit codes are usually used to indicate the success or failure of a program. Using a special variable in the shell, we can check the status of the previous command.

Supplemental Topics

While helpful, the videos below are not required for the UC Davis course. We encourage you to review them regardless.

Interacting with jobs

This video introduces the concept of jobs in a terminal. Jobs can be run in the foreground or background, and can be paused or stopped.

Conditional execution, PATH, and SSH keys

This video briefly covers a few topics:

• Conditional execution can be used to run commands only if a previous command ran successfully or not.
• The PATH variable informs the shell of where to look for executable programs.
• SSH keys provide an alternative form of authentication for remote machines.

---