In the first part of the course, we will learn basic information about the Shell and popular Shell commands. We will practice using the command in the GitHub codespace.

A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. The shell is both an interactive command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to control the execution of the system using shell scripts.

Shell commonly refers to the UNIX shell environment, provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. Because desired actions are expressed as typed commands, it is possible to script (program) sets of those commands to be (re-)executed repetitively or conditionally. For example, it provides constructs for loops, functions, and conditions. In contrast to GUIs (graphical user interfaces), it allows for automation via scripting.

• 👀 Video 👀 Watch the first 20min video of my presentation from ABCD/RerproNim course for introduction to shell and a short demo session (I will share more of the video later during this course, so no need to watch more than till 19m54s)

Questions:

• Do you know what is the main difference between working with GUI and working with Shell?
• Do you know how can you determine what shell you’re currently in?
• Do you know what is bash?

As I mentioned before we will be using GitHub and GitHub Skills templates, if you are not familiar with GitHub and exercise, and you haven't had a chance to complete these 2 short GitHub courses, this is the time to do it before you start using the knowledge for this course.

• Introduction to GitHub
• Code with Codespace (the first 3 steps are enough for this course)

Questions:

• Do you know what are the branches in this repository? Do you know how to change the branch?
• Do you know how to create a Pull Request (i.e., update the main branch)?
• Do you know how to open Codepsace?

1. Opening Codespace with terminal

• Start from the landing page of your repository opened in new tab.
• Change the branch to "part1" (you should see a new content that was not in the main branch)
• Click the green "Code" button located in the middle of the page.
• Select the Codespaces tab in the box that pops up and then click the "Create codespace on part1" button.
• Verify your codespace is running. The browser should contain a VS Code web-based editor and a terminal.

2. Practice using the command you learn about from the video in the first section. Here is a list and some examples:

• echo $SHELL
• ls, ls -l
• try using man to learn more about the commands, e.g. man ls
• mkdir tmp (we will not be saving content in this directory)
• cd tmp (move to this directory for practicing more commands)
• pwd (it should be the name of the repository)
• touch <filename> (if something is in brackets <> that means you should replace it with your own name, e.g. touch new_file.txt, note it is better to not use spaces in the filename)
• mv <existing_file> <new_file>
• cp <existing_file> <new_file> (you can practice using wildcart *)
• practice using bash history (:arrow_up:, ctrl + r, history)
• practice using tab completion

3. Remove the tmp directory to keep clean repository

• cd .. (move one directory higher in the hierarchy)
• pwd (it should be the same as previously, the name of the repository)
• rm -r tmp (remove the tmp directory)

1. Go to terminal in Codespace (you can use the one that you opened in part 3, or follow the instruction from part 3 to open again)
2. Create a new file (week1/file1.txt) to the repository with content "Hello!":

• Go to week1 directory (if you don't see this directory, you're likely in wrong branch)
• Create a new file file1.txt with a content "Hello" (you can use touch or/and echo command)
• Add a new file to the repository and commit the changes

3. Update the changes to the main branch of the repository

• Create a Pull Request to the main branch
• Check the status of tests
• If all tests pass, merge the Pull Request, this should update a new README.md on the main page of the repository (you can reload the page after 30-60s if you don't see the new content)

Get help: Submit an issue

Work was founded by BSSw Fellowship Program

MIT License