CS2106 Lab Introduction
CS2106: Operating Systems
AY24/25 Semester 1
Introduction to Linux
Section 1. Introduction
If you used Unix or one of the Unix variants before, then most of the introductions below
should be familiar to you. Feel free to skip all the parts which you already understood. For
example, if you used SoC’s unix server stu (by SSH into [Link]) before in
other modules, then the differences are quite minor.
1.1 Getting access to Linux
Here's a couple of ways to get access to a Linux installation. Take note of option 1, as we
will use it as the standard test platform for evaluating your lab submissions.
Option Details
1. Use SoC Compute Cluster
Requirements:
• You need SoC account to use these nodes. Please go to
[Link] to (re)activate your account.
• You need to enable SoC Compute Cluster. Please go to
[Link] to enable the
facility.
NOTE: The clusters are using a different filesystem from your
[Link] home directory. Thus, you will not be able to see your
files from your normal home directory.
The SoC clusters use a load management system called “slurm”. The slurm
system allows you to log in to a common login node (see later), then use slurm
commands to send work to the cluster nodes.
The differences in using slurm versus just compiling and running on a server is
quite minimal, requiring you to just add the “srun” command.
Usage:
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1. Use any SSH Client to connect to [Link] server using
your SoC Credentials.
Note: If you are connecting from outside NUS, you must connect to
the SoC VPN, NOT the NUS VPN. Please see
[Link] for how
to connect to the SoC VPN.
2. You will now be in one of the login nodes (xlog0 to xlog2). From here
you can submit Slurm jobs:
a. Type “salloc” (without the quotes )to be given a job allocation. This
allocates a node from the cluster for you to run your program.
Slurm replies with:
162696 is a job allocation number. You will see a different number
but that doesn’t matter.
b. To run your program on slurm, precede all commands with srun.
The “srun” command acquires resources (e.g. nodes) to run your
command and helps the cluster balance loads. If you don’t use
srun you will end up doing everything on the login node xlog. To
compile a program in C called test.c, without slurm we would do:
gcc test.c -o test
On slurm, we would do:
srun gcc test.c -o test
Aside from having to precede our commands with srun, running
programs on slurm is pretty much the same as running on a normal
Linux server.
Note that you can get a shell on one of the cluster nodes by doing
srun --pty /bin/bash.
2. Install Ubuntu 20.04 natively on your PC
A great way to experience Linux on your own machine. You can gain
useful experience "playing" with Ubuntu to learn the common
operations on Linux
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3. Use VM on your PC to run Ubuntu 20.04
Instead of going for a full native installation. You can use VM tool, e.g.
VirtualBox on your PC to run Ubuntu. You can get Ubuntu here:
[Link]
1.2 The Command Line Interface (CLI)
Whenever your login to the Compute Cluster Node (or start a terminal on Ubuntu).The
terminal you started is actually composed of two programs. One is a graphical application
which gives a window and a terminal emulation. The other is a shell which interprets ASCII
command lines which is connected to the terminal. The shell uses a command line
interface, because it is text based. You type in commands to a shell which performs the
command(s) in that line of text. In Windows, there is also acommand line shell, cmd which
has a similar purpose.
There are a number of different shells available under Linux. BASH ( Bourne AgainSHell) is
the default and is a GNU enhancement descended from the original Unix shell, the Bourne
shell (sh). You can write shell scripts which are small programs in the shell language to run
a series of shell commands.
1.3 Using the built-in manual page ( man )
(Note: For relatively small jobs like reading man pages, listing files in the directory or copying,
it should be ok to run the commands directly on the xlog login node (xlog0, xlog1 or xlog2)
instead of using srun to acquire resources to run the commands. However, for most tasks
like compiling and running your lab programs, please use srun to allow slurm to balance the
resources)
Most Unix commands and C built-in libraries have built-in documentation. Use the
Unix Manual command: man to access these documentation:
man XXXX
where XXXX is either the command/C built-in library call/etc that you want to knowmore
about. For example, the mancommand itself is self-documenting:
$ man man
The above means “get the manual page for the command man”Try
out:
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$ man fprintf
Which explain the C-Library function fprintf(). Take note that Unix man pagesare written
in a terse and very technical fashion. So it works more like a reference rather than a user-
friendly tutorial. For a taste of a very long and scary looking manpage, try "man gcc"!
The manual pages are organized using sections, and an entry might be in more than one
section, e.g. man 1 login documents the command line login program while man 3 login
documents the files which record the users of the system. You can search for keywords
with the -k option, eg. man -k login.
The various manual sections have their own introduction. Try man intro orman 1 intro.
System calls are described in man 2 intro. The man uses a pager, which is another program
to display one page at a time on a terminal. You can pageforward with [SPACE], backward
with 'b' and quit the manual page at any time with‘q’.
1.3 Listing Files and Directories
The ls command will list all the files in the specified directories. You can use the -l option
for a long listing format which displays information like size, permissions, owner, group,
creation date, etc. If you do not specify a directory, by default it usesthe current directory.
The -R option causes ls to list recursively.
Some examples to try:
$ ls
$ ls -l
$ ls /
$ ls -l /
1.4 Editing Files
You can use various text editors either directly from the desktop or the terminal. Some
editors are strictly text based and some have a graphical interface in X. Many editors are
available such as: emacs, vi, vim, gedit, etc. Editors like emacs and vi / vim are not so easy
to use but are fairly powerful and popular with programmers. You are encouraged to learn
vi/vim or emacs, many tutorials are available on the web. (Note: vim and emacs are
available on Windows too).
If you are new to Unix, you can use gedit / nano which is more user friendly. On the slurm
servers you should invoke your editor using srun because you are likely to be running it for
a while. To do so with vim, for example:
srun --pty vim [Link]
The --pty option tells srun to give you an interactive session so that you can work with vim.
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Without this option vim will be running on a node but you will not be able to interact with
it.
1.5 Backup and Transferring Files
If you need to transfer files and folders to / from the compute cluster node, thereare a few
common choices:
1.5.1 scp: Secure Copy. A command you can type to move files between Compute
Cluster Node and stu. E.g. to transfer a file called “[Link]” to your cluster
account:
E.g.: scp [Link] <username>@[Link]:~/
This will copy [Link] to your home directory on the cluster by coping to xlog
(<username> is your xlog user ID, which is the same as the user ID you use to log
in to [Link]). Note that you SHOULD NOT copy the files to your
[Link] home directory as files there will not appear in the clusters
filesystem.
1.5.2 git: Popular version control software. ** Please ensure your git repository for
CS2106 labs is private. **
1.6 Some Things to Remember!
The following are notable points for using Unix in general and also applicable toLinux:
1.6.1 Unix is case sensitive. Most commands are lowercase.
1.6.2 Unlike Windows, Unix has no drive letters (i.e. no C:, D:, E: etc). Everything isin
some directory (i.e. folder).
1.6.3 Unix uses forward slash (/) to separate directory names, while Windows uses
backslash (\).
1.6.4 The * wildcard is treated uniformly by Unix shells. In Windows, * worksdifferently
for different programs.
1.6.5 It is worthwhile to look first at the man page of a command
1.6.6 Try using various command line programs. Some programs need administrator
privileges (in Unix, this is the root user who has superuser privileges) to run.
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Section 2 Sample Usage Session
Skip this section if you already know how to use Unix / Linux.
1. mkdir junk // makes a new directory (i.e. folder) junk
2. cd junk //change directory to it, you are now in junk
3. pwd //prints the path of your current directory
4. echo abcd > [Link] // makes a new file [Link] with contents“abcd"
5. less [Link] //display [Link] using the pager. `q' will quitfrom
less and `h' will give the help screen.
Select an editor to use (see previous editing section).
1. edit the file [Link], eg.
srun --pty nano [Link] //or any editor of your choice. Here we use
// slurm as we may potentially use nano for
// a long time. Note the --pty option that creates
// a shell for you to interact with nano.
OR
nano [Link] // On your own Ubuntu or other Linux box.
2. change the content of the file (currently “abcd") to something else
3. save the file in the editor (this is editor specific)
4. cat [Link] //concatenate 1 or more files, and print tooutput,
so this displays [Link] because output is the terminal
5. cat [Link] [Link] > [Link] //[Link] is
concatenated twice and the output saved to [Link]
6. cp [Link] [Link] //copies [Link] to [Link]
7. ls //listing should show 3 fiels
8. rm [Link] //deletes [Link]
9. ls //only [Link] and [Link] left
10. rmdir ../junk //try to remove directory, complains about non-
empty directory
11. rm test*.txt; cd .. ; rmdir junk //no more files indirectory,
go up to parent directory, remove junk directory. You can perform multiple
commands in a single line by using the “;” separator.
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12. logout // or you can just press <Ctrl-D>
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