Unix Labs

Unix Lab 4b Files Moving, Copying and removing files In the last lab we showed how you could create an empty file with the touch command: file1 Renaming a file is done by moving it from one name to another: $mv file1 precious To make a copy of the file the cp command:use $cp precious precious.old creates a duplicate copy of precious precious.old To remove some of the files you have created from above $rm precious file1 Unix is case sensitive so Junk is not the same as junk. ****************************************************************************** Some file processing commands: touch

grep, sort, wc, cut, paste

First create the following text using the text editor in and save it to your directory as poem . Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite em And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

$wc poem

the output will be :

46

263

poem

which tells you , poem has 8 lines, 46 words and 263 characters.

The wc command options, when no option is specified the default is all options.

Unix Labs
OPTION -l -w -c OPERATION Reports the number of lines Reports the number of words Reports the number of characters

You can also specify more than one file name in the argument: $wc file1 file2 will print out the word count and number of lines for files file1 and file2.

grep: You can use the grep command to search for a specified pattern in a file or list of files. The pattern used by the grep command is called regular expression, whence the strange name of the command ( Global Regular Expression Print). grep is a file searching and selection command. You specify the filename and the pattern to be looked for in the file and when grep finds a match, the line containing the specified pattern is displayed. Suppose you wish to look for the word fleas in poem. $ grep fleas poem grep will also look for lines that dont match the pattern when the option v is used. grep v fleas poem grep is useful for displaying only those lines in a large file that you are interested in. For example if your login name is mohanlo to show the details in the password file for this user: grep mohanlo passwd

Understanding fields in /etc/passwd

The /etc/passwd contains one entry per line for each user (or user account) of the system. All fields are separated by a colon (:) symbol. Total seven fields as follows. Generally, passwd file entry looks as follows

Unix Labs
1. 2. 3. Username: It is used when user logs in. It should be between 1 and 32 characters in length. Password: An x character indicates that encrypted password is stored in /etc/shadow file. User ID (UID): Each user must be assigned a user ID (UID). UID 0 (zero) is reserved for root and UIDs 1-99 are reserved for other predefined accounts. Further UID 100-999 are reserved by system for administrative and system accounts/groups. 4. 5. 6. 7. Group ID (GID): The primary group ID (stored in /etc/group file) User ID Info: The comment field. It allow you to add extra information about the users such as user's full name, phone number etc. This field use by finger command. Home directory: The absolute path to the directory the user will be in when they log in. If this directory does not exists then users directory becomes / Command/shell: The absolute path of a command or shell (/bin/bash). Typically, this is a shell. Please note that it does not have to be a shell.

Task 1: To find the number of students from ft281 that have student accounts on the system. Use grep to list all the entries for students from this class in the passwd file to a new file called list (use the redirection > symbol to redirect the output from the grep command to the new file). Then use wc command on temp to find the number of students in your class.

grep options Option -c -i -l -n -v OPeration Displays only the count of the matching lines in each file that contains the match Ignores the distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters in the search pattern displays the names of the files with one or more matching lines, not the lines themselves Displays a line number before each output line. Displays only those lines that do not match the pattern

Unix Labs
sort - sorts its input into alphabetic order line by line. Try this for the file poem: sort poem Sorting is line by line, but the default sorting order puts blanks first, then upper case letters, then lower case, so its not strictly alphabetical. sort has many options to control the order of sorting ( man sort) but the most common are: sort r Reverse normal order sort -n Sort in numeric order sort nr Sort in reverse numeric order sort f Fold upper and lower case together sort +n Sort starting at the n+1 field sort u suppresses all but one of each group of lines that are identical in the sort field Task 2 We want a list of all the students logins as well as the students full name in ft281-2 sorted alphabetically and stored in a file called ft281-, this information will be extracted from the passwd file2. You will need a further command cut (see below) to obtain this list. Note the file should only have the login name and fullname of the student in it.

You can use cut command to cut out specific columns or fields from files. Many files are collections of records, each record consisting of several fields. You might be interested in some of the fields or columns contained in a file. Often you have to tell cut what character delimits each field (tab is the default delimiter). For instance in the passwd file the : delimits each field. so if we wanted to display just the first field of every entry in the passwd file: cut f1 d: passwd If we wanted to show the home directories of all users we : cut f6 d: passwd We can also display two fields simultaneously: cut f1,6 d: passwd

cut options Option -f -c Operation specifies the field position specifies the character position

Unix Labs -d Specifies the field seperator

paste You can use paste command to join files together line by line, or you can create new files by pasting together fields from two or more files. Use the grep command to find all the entries in the passwd file with ft281-2 references and redirect the output to a file ft281-2.dat. use the cut command to extract the first field: cut f1 d: ft281-2.dat > usernames.dat Similarily extract the fifth field with: cut f5 -d: ft281-2 > fullnames.dat We now have two files both of which have the same number of lines and consist of a single column. We can now paste the two files together. paste usernames.dat fullnames.dat > studentnames.dat Task3 From task 1 the wc command would have given you more than the number of students in the class use the cut command to obtain the number of students. (i.e. the final output should be just 4 )

Pipes
All of the examples above rely on the same method: putting the output of one program into the input of another via a temporary file. But the temporary file is a clumsy way of operating. A way to avoid using a temporary is to employ a pipe. A pipe is a way to connect the output of one program to the input of another program without any temporary file. $ who | sort $who | wc -l Print sorted list of users Counts the number of users logged in

Task4 Use the pipe to : Count the number of files in your directory. Count the number of files in the /etc directory. Count the number of users in the passwd file. You should also be able to obtain the correct output for task1,2,and 3 above with a single command line using pipes (see below for use of multiple pipes). 5

Unix Labs

You can have as many programs in a pipeline as you wish: To find how many times a user is logged on (try andreas1) who | grep andreas1 | wc -l

Task 5 Produce a sorted list of all the student groups from the password file. There should be one line for each group. A group should not be list twice.

Summary of commands cat filename cd directory_name grep phrase filename grep phrase grep -v phrase ls ls directory_name ls -l ls -a ls -r man command man -k keyword mkdir directory_name pwd ls -a rm filename rm -f write contents of filename to the screen change current directory to directory_name search filename for phrase and print matching lines read from the standard input, and print lines matching phrase print all lines not matching phrase List files in current directory (not including files that start with a dot. List files in directory_name List files with permissions, ownership and last modified date List all files, including files that start with a dot (like the .netscape directory) List contents recursively, that is , list contents of subdirectories. Show online documentation/help about command Show commands related to keyword. Handy if you need help, but don'tknow the name of the command Makes a directory called directory_name Prints the name of the current directory you are in List all files, including files that start with a dot Removes filename f is for "force". With this option, files are removed without confirmation.

rm -r directory_name recursively delete directory_name and its contents.

Unix Labs rmdir directory_name Removes a directory called directory_name. Only works on empty directories. to remove a nonempty directory, see rm -rf wc filename print the number of lines, words, and characters in filename. If No filename is given, stdin is used.