In an effort to better acquaint our new computing users with the UNIX platform and the vi text editor, Academic Computing Services plans to offer several short courses in October.
In addition to the courses listed below, others may be announced later in the semester, so keep checking the What's New portion of ACS' homepage in RPinfo for the most recent course information.
This course provides an introduction to the UNIX operating system as it is used on RCS, and introduces several common UNIX commands, some of which have to do with managing and printing files. The course will also provide information about output redirection, pipes, and filename wildcards, describe the UNIX file system and path names, review some UNIX commands for manipulating directories, and introduce AFS commands for controlling directory permissions. The course, which will intersperse brief exercises between topics for hands-on practice, provides a basis for other short courses, including those on emacs, vi, and "Workstation Fortran".
You can use a text editor to create, edit, store, retrieve, and view files, so you might need a text editor when you write a program or a paper, or edit a mail message. Several text editors exist on RCS, including nedit, emacs, and vi, and you can use whichever one you choose -- or you can use all three at different times! (ACS offers courses on emacs and vi, but nedit is so simple that it requires no instruction. However, nedit differs from the other two text editors in that you cannot use it remotely.)
This course introduces the vi text editor, a file editor available on all UNIX systems. On RCS workstations, vi is a full-screen editor that starts up quickly and has adequate functionality for many text editing tasks, such as composing source code and mail messages. vi uses no menus; you must use keystrokes to enter commands.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX