home directory

Each account has a home directory: the root of a subtree of all your files, separate from everyone else's files.

The location of the home directory usually follows some kind of naming scheme, but it can be arbitrary.

I know you've already talked about it a decent amount, but I am still a bit confused about what ~ means in the different contexts. I would also love a bit more detail about Emacs and vim.

Sure. It takes some getting used to. In a nutshell:

~ is my home directory, where "my" means the person who is logged in.
~fred is Fred's home directory, which is looked up in a "account database" (historically, /etc/passwd but nowadays could be some networked database, like the Active Directory database that LTS uses for your domain passwords.

Example:

~/cs204 is your cs204 folder, the one in your home directory.
~cs204 is the CS 204 course account, where this web page lives.

The following copies a file from the course account to your account:

cp ~cs204/path/to/source/file ~/cs204/path/to/destination/file

I think personally I would like a bit more review about the ~ because its a bit confusing how I can go to someone else's directory, but it's also not that big of a deal! I honestly might re-read the reading and go over the slides on my own :)

You'll get it!

I would like to talk more about the directories and wildcards, especially the wildcards since they can be so dangerous. I thought the * to match file names was really interesting and helpful. I would like to know more about how to use them properly. x 4

Here's a real-world example that isn't all that dangerous. Suppose I upload a bunch of pictures of my son't wedding from my phone to my laptop. Now I want to copy them to a folder on the server where I'm going to put some of them onto a wedding website:

scott@Scotts-Macbook-Pro Downoads % scp 20230802*.HEIC anderson@cs:public_html/wedding/imgs/

I would also like to know more about how we identify relative and absolute pathnames.

The command above used relative pathnames twice: files in the Downloads folder on my laptop, and a relative path from my home directory to the imgs folder.

tar, gzip x 3

Tar puts a bunch of files into a single file. When you download a folder from Google Drive, it downloads the collection as a zip file: pretty much the same thing.

Gzip is a compression algorithm: takes a big file and makes it smaller.

The two are often combined, but they are conceptually separate operations.

tar and gzip and drop. and possibly some practices of making files and directories

The drop command is one I created; it's not standard Unix. There's some magic involved that is outside our scope, but the basic idea is that the drop command transfers one of your files to a recipient. The recipient needs to have a ~/drop folder.

It's conceptually similar to dropbox.com

If you need to drop a lot of files, you can drop a tarfile or zip file.

I would like to learn more about the "man" page. The reading stated how every command has a "man" page but it would be interesting to what exactly it's purpose it and in what situations we would need to access it.

Long before Google, the web, and practically before the Internet, there were online man pages to document commands and give details about their usage.

They're still useful. I use them all the time. Sometimes, I look them up on the web, but because there are variant versions of commands, if I want to know how the tar command works on a particular computer, I use the man page.

I would like to practice talking about unix a bit more - I think I understand some parts, but I'm a bit confused about how they apply to what we will be working with.

A lot of what we do is writing code: HTML, CSS, JS. But part of the mechanics is putting the files in the right place, and setting things up with the structure of files and folders that we want. Unix commands help us do that.

They're also a first step to more advanced knowlege.

I would like to talk more about how we manage files and directories, especially with using the commands. I think seeing how we use them will help me better see how they work.I also want to discuss the wildcards I kept re-reading it and was still unsure as to what it does. I know that the asterisk character matches any character and as many as possible but I am still unsure of how it works or how I can use it.

We'll get lots of practice throughout the course.

I would love to have more examples of moving and removing directories, so I can have a context of when and how to use the commands.

Again, lots of practice.

Some real-world examples to see how the commands are used, or what are some scenarios where we will need them in this course.

Ditto