On the résumé that convinced HotWired to hire me, I said that I knew enough about Unix that it didn't scare me anymore. This wasn't exactly true. Unix was still a chilling concept for me when I arrived at the San Francisco office armed with a copy of Unix for Dummies. The managing editor steered me to my desk and instead of the Macintosh I was hoping for, there sat a purple SGI.
I realized then that I needed to learn a lot about Unix fast. Initially I tried using SGI's graphical user interface, which mimics the Macintosh desktop fairly well, but soon realized that it was just too damn slow. So I stole some better Unix books from the engineering staff and found a nice Unix expert to help me. Soon I was cp-ing, mv-ing, and chmod-ing like lightning.
Unix still gives me the occasional nightmare, but basically I love it. It's fast, it makes sense (most of the time), and anyone can figure it out with a little hard work. Plus, it looks great on a résumé. If you can convince a prospective employer that you have a working knowledge of Unix, you're one step ahead of everyone else who is too scared even to try figuring it out.
I've put together a very basic explanation of Unix to get you started. But first, a warning. Unix is very powerful. The wrong collection of keystrokes can blow away files that you'll probably never be able to recover, so practice on sample files before you move on to anything important.
Getting started
Before you can do anything, you need an account. Find someone at your school or workplace whose title is webmaster, server administrator, systems administrator, or Unix god. Be very nice to these people. Bring gifts and libations, and then ask them to set up an account and user directory for you.
Promise that you won't bug them very often with questions, although this may indeed turn out to be a white lie.
Keep in mind that Unix installations vary widely. If something doesn't work for you here, it may be that a program wasn't installed or your account was misconfigured. There's also a strong possibility that you're using one of several different kinds of Unix, which means your commands may vary slightly from what you learn here. If you run into trouble, go ask the person who set up your account to help you - but don't forget to bring a gift.
Once you've got your account, go to the bookstore and purchase a few Unix books. My favorites are Open Computing's Unix Unbound and O'Reilly & Associates' UNIX in a Nutshell. The first is a great way to introduce yourself to the hows and whys of the operating system, and the second is a fabulous dictionary of commands.
Telnet
To access your account, you'll need a shell (a program that sends whatever you type to the host computer). The easiest way to go about this is to open a Telnet window. (If you're sitting at the host computer, you'll already have a shell.) Accessing files with Telnet is essentially the same as opening the chooser on your Mac or opening the Network Neighborhood on a PC - except that when you get into the file structure, you won't find all those sissy color-coded directories.
So open Telnet, and choose Open Connection from the File menu. Fill in the Host/Session Name slot with your host's address and hit Connect. You'll be asked to enter the username and password that your nice sysadmin assigned you when your account was set up. You should also have a user directory, which is the first place you'll end up when you Telnet to your Host. When you log on, you should get something that looks like this:
