The prompt shows you the pathname of the directory that you are currently in. When you log in, the default directory is your home directory, which is at /u/your_username.
Unix commands are case sensitive, and with few exceptions, they are lower-case.
One useful thing before we get to the actual commands: when typing filenames or names of programs, you can type the first few characters of the name, and then press <tab>. The filename will be completed for you as much as it can be. So, if I have a directory called public_html, and I have no other files that begin with a p, then I can type p<tab> and public_html will appear on the screen. This is really useful for long filenames. Play around with it and you'll get the idea fairly quickly.
The following are some useful commands...
Commands related to jobs
File-related stuff
Unix file names have few limitations on them. You can use most characters; they can be just about as long as you want; and they are case sensitive. So, "this+is+_a_Legal.filename" is a legal filename. So is "myFIle.hithere.txt".
I am planning to install a POP server on Big W which would allow everyone that has an account on it to use Netscape's e-mail program. However, I don't know when this is going to happen. In the mean time, Pine is an excellent substitute.
There is actually a second e-mail program installed that you can access by typing mail from the command line. I don't reccommend using it. If you get into it by accident, just type q to exit.
If you just want to send a quick note, you can do it from the command line by typing mail address where address is the person's e-mail address. This puts you in an extremely simple editor. You cannot edit a line once you have pressed return! When you are done, press Control-D on a line by itself. If you want to kill the letter, type Control-C twice.
That's it! E-mail is really very easy to use.
vi is what all the Unix gurus use. However, it's fairly cryptic, and I don't feel like taking the time to write out documentation on it. So, I recommend using Pico, which is the same text editor that is used in Pine, the e-mail system which is installed on Big W.
You can use Pico by typing pico filename or edit filename where filename is the name of the file you want to edit. (If the file doesn't already exist, a new file will be opened.) Like Pine, Pico is basically intuitive, so I'll let you figure it out. :-)
If you really want to use vi, type vi filename. If you get into vi and can't figure out how to quit, you can get out by typing <esc>:q<return>.
To use the compiler, edit your code using Big W's text editor, or edit it somewhere else and then upload it to Big W. To compile your code in C, type gcc -o outfile infile.c, where outfile is the filename of where you want the compiled program to be stored, and infile.c is the name of the source code you are compiling.
To compile C++ code, type g++ -o outfile infile.c.
I don't know Objective C or FORTRAN, so I don't know offhand what the command is to compile code written in those languages.
So for example, suppose I have a C program called myFirstProgram.c. To compile
it, I would type
One last note: If your program crashes, it will sometimes say "core dumped". This means what's called a core file was generated. You'll want to delete this file by typing rm core since it usually takes up a fair amount of disk space.