UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hello everyone

i have to start with unix as it is a part of my training programme and i have to do a self study, i dont know where to start from. i need some basic questions to be answerd like why we use unix ? what is a terminal? what is an editor? why we write commands inside terminal?
these may be dumb questions but i need help.please help out

Welcome to the forum.

You can start by searching for your answers in the forum (or even google what you want).

Here are few links to start with:
1. Frequently Asked Questions
2. What Books Should I Read?
3. The Terminal in UNIX (external link)

thanks the links helped.

---------- Post updated at 03:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:37 PM ----------

please tell whether writing commands in unix terminal is scripting ? if not how do we script? are shell scripting and unix scripting differnt?

shell script = combination of commands which is used to do particular task.

so, basically you need to read more unix commands and execute the commands in terminal and understand it

after that, you can read about the shells, conditions, loops,..etc

If you put few commands in a logical sequence in a file and give it execute permissions, then this file becomes a script.

For e.g., you can write a script to forcefully delete all the log files in a directory and notify the user if removal was a success.

Code:

#! /bin/bash
rm -f /my/dir/*.log
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "All log files removed"
else
    echo "Looks like something happened"
fi

Shell script is a script written for a shell. And the shell could be any, depending on the OS you're working on.

Unix script could mean a script written specifically for any of the shells of Unix.