Study of UNIX OS

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Operating System
An operating system (OS) is an interface between hardware and user which is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of a computer, that acts as a host for computing applications run on the machine.

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What is UNIX?
UNIX is an operating system which was first developed in the 1960s . It is a stable, multi-user, multitasking system for servers, desktops and laptops .

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Types
There are many different versions of UNIX, although they share common similarities. The most popular varieties of UNIX are Sun Solaris, GNU/Linux, and MacOS X.

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Advantages
Unix is more flexible and can be installed on many different types of machines, including main-frame computers, supercomputers and micro-computers. Unix is more stable and does not go down as often as Windows does, therefore requires less administration and maintenance. Unix has greater built-in security and permissions features than Windows. Unix possesses much greater processing power than Windows. Unix is the leader in serving the Web. About 90% of the Internet relies on Unix operating systems running Apache, the world's most widely used Web server. Software upgrades from Microsoft often require the user to purchase new or more hardware or prerequisite software. That is not the case with Unix.

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UNIX Architecture
The UNIX operating system is made up of three parts . 1. kernel 2. shell 3. programs

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kernel
The core or key components of the operating system . Kernel consists of many kernel subsystems like process management, memory management, file management, device management and network management. It allocates time and memory to programs and handles the filestore and communications in response to system calls.

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Shell
The shell acts as an interface between the user and the kernel. The shell is a command line interpreter (CLI). It interprets the commands the user types in and arranges for them to be carried out.

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Shell categories
Unix shells can be broadly divided into four categories 1.Bourne-like 2.C shell-like 3.Nontraditional 4.Historical

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 Bourne shell (sh) Almquist shell (ash) Bourne-Again shell (bash) Debian Almquist shell (dash) Korn shell (ksh) Z shell (zsh) C shell (csh) TENEX C shell (tcsh)
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Programs
Everything in UNIX is either a file or a process. A process is an executing program identified by a unique PID (process identifier). A file is a collection of data. They are created by users using text editors, running compilers etc.
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Examples of files
A document (report, essay etc.) The text of a program written in some high-level programming language Instructions comprehensible directly to the machine and incomprehensible to a casual user, for example, a collection of binary digits (an executable or binary file) A directory, containing information about its contents, which may be a mixture of other directories (subdirectories) and ordinary files.

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The Directory Structure

All the files are grouped together in the directory structure. The file-system is arranged in a hierarchical structure, like an inverted tree. The top of the hierarchy is traditionally called root (written as a slash / )
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 The full path to the file report.doc is "/home/its/ug1/ee51vn/report. doc"

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Starting an UNIX terminal

To open an UNIX terminal window, click on the "Terminal" icon from Applications/Accessories menus. An UNIX Terminal window will then appear with a % prompt, waiting for you to start entering commands.

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