Terminal - Communicate With Zeta Through a Shell

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Terminal - Remote logins With Ssh vi - An Text Editor

Info
The name of the Terminal application comes from the physical terminal devices that where connected to old UNIX mainframes. Each terminal consisted of a keyboard for input and a screen for text output. The Terminal application provides the same function, allowing you to enter your commands through the keyboard and to view the output in the Terminal window.

Info
Zeta is not a UNIX-based operating system. This common misunderstanding is probably caused by Zeta's Terminal and the ported GNU applications, which allow users to operate most of the aspects of the system from a bash shell.

Terminal - Communicate With Zeta Through a Shell

Terminal provides access to the Zeta shell from whitin the graphical environment. The Terminal application comes with Zeta as a system application.

The shell interprets command lines you enter, runs programs you ask for, and generally coordinates what happens between you and the operating system. You can have several terminal windows running at the same time. each doing something different.

The graphical environment provides access to many of the most commonly used UNIX commands, but some commands are still only available to the user from within the text-based interface of the shell.

The Terminal window displays a command prompt when and where you can type the shell commands. The shell outputs a prompt to tell you that you can enter a command line. The shell prompts usually end with $. When the shell command is completed, the prompt will reappear.

Each command line includes the name of a Unix program. When you press RETURN, the shell interprets your command line and executes the program.

The bash shell remember command lines you've typed before. This feature can save you a lot of retyping common commands. After you've typed and executed some command lines, press the up-arrow key on your keyboard. Once you have recalled a command line, you can even edit it before executing it once again. The left-arrow and right-arrow keys will move your cursor along the command line to the point where you want to make the change.

When you finish using the Terminal window, you can exit the Terminal window by typing the shell command exit (or press Ctrl+D). This will close the Terminal window. The Terminal application shouldn't be closed by pressing the close button in the tab. You will then not close all running commands, for instance commands connecting you to another computer (rlogin, telnet and ssh) will continue running.

Common shells include Bourne (sh), Korn (ksh), C (csh) and tcsh. The most widely used is bash, and that is also the one used in Zeta.

Examples on commands:
* date - shows today's date
* pwd - print working directory
* cd - change directory
* ls - list
* mv - move
* cp - copy
* rm - remove

Some commands are built in to the Terminal application and do not excist as separate files. Examples are starting and stopping commands, repeating commands, and moving through the file structure.

The man command
Is in the different version of UNIX available, Zeta has adapted the UNIX way of documenting the different shell based applications.

Most shell applications has an inbuilt manual, that you can access by simply writing man in front of the application, for instance $ man pine.

You will find that only reading the manual pages isn't enough, as understanding them can difficult. Most of these pages seem complex at first sight, having been written for UNIX system administrators. The key to understanding them, is to read enough of them so that you begin to absorb the concept through familiarity.

Info
If you are interested in learning of to controll Zeta through it's shell, yellowTAB recommends you buying a book about the shell type bash.

GNU
GNU - The prosject was started in 1984 to develop a completely free Unix-like operating system, the GNU system. GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix". Most of the command based applications you find in Zeta are ported from this project. If you are interested in reading more about this project, please visit http://www.gnu.org.

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