Objectives

• Create a project.
• Create directories to organize a project.
• Create files to contain project information.
• Edit and Remove files.
• Explore and Navigate through the Unix File System structure.

Overview

First a little story. We'll get around to the technical parts in a bit. But, I've found that all projects start with a story. In fact, they can actually turn into a story of epic proportions over time. We won't make this an epic, we only have twelve weeks here.

A couple of years ago I bumped into an old schoolmate of mine, Morty. Now Morty was kind of a hardware geek. I mean stuff in hardware stores like nails, saws, electrical fixtures, ya know.

Morty realized an ambition awhile ago, now that he a was a fully grown geek and had saved up a bunch of money from working in the nail factory. Morty went into the hardware store business. And Morty knew I had had been working with "the computers" and thought I might know something about "the apps" and "the internets".

See, Morty kinda lived in 1945 and only begrudgingly picked up these highly technical terms like "the computers" and "the internets".

Even though he wasn't happy about it, he read in a highly popular industry journal that hardware store proprietors where now expected to use "the internets" and "the computers" to maximize profits.

So, upon seeing me he dove right into a campaign to play upon the very sliver of a relationship we had decades ago. He was trying to get me to do some free work for him.

I told him I could help him out, but he wasn't gonna get much for the price. Of course, he didn't hear that part and just launched into a tirade about how he has structured his store, priced his items organized all the bits and hardware bobs.

Now I'm kind of like, whoa slow done Morty let me get the laptop out and we'll sit over on this bench over here. Hey, Morty you got about thirty minutes of a highly paid software developer's time for nothing so let's go through this in a highly ordered and structured way, you pain in the butt you.

BTW, I never really liked Morty after that time he shook my hand with a fully charged capacitor that sent me flying across the school yard.

I really should screw this little project up royally, huh? Payback.

Ok Mort. What you're getting for nothing is a project that contains a set of files that are important to your business. We'll organize them in a way that, hopefully, will make sense for your business. You'll be able to easily locate, organize, capture and generally manage the information that relates to your business. No web applications, I charge a lot of money to people I sometimes like for that service. And you aren't paying me and, ahh, do remember that time I went flying across the school yard?

First Morty, no, no stop talking Morty, wait, wait the clock is ticking here. I'm going to ask you a set of targeted questions about your business domain, the hardware stores, and you're going to answer in the brief way.

What am I doing this for?

We Do

Now let's get onto the job of helping Morty out.

First Morty, lets have a very limited conversation about your business. I'm going to ask you questions and your going to, hopefully, provide me with small focused and succint answers. OK?

Morty what are the departments in your store?

"Lawn and Garden", Plumbing, Electrical, Tools and Hardware.*

Ok, lets first create a project that you Morty are going to work in and own. I'm out of here in about 25 minutes.

Open up the terminal.

This will bring up the command line interface (CLI) we can work in. We'll be typing Unix commands and viewing our project.

We can click in the magnifying glass in the upper-right side of window, in the menu up there. Then type terminal and hit return.

Alternatively, you can type 'Cmd-Space' to bring up Spotlight search. Then type terminal and hit return.

Hey, I did it, woohoo!

Good. Now Morty this is where real developers do a lot, I mean a lot of their work. And you might like this because it's a little closer to the time warp your living in. It's been around since probably the sixties, I've been using it since 1976 myself.

Let's try to get an idea what directory the terminal has put us in by default.

(Note: the command to type will be preceded by the '$' character.)

$ pwd
/Users/tdyer

This will show you what the present working directory, pwd is. You might have heard directories called folders. Directories are what one uses to organize files in the computer's file system.

Oh, look the "present working directory" is my home, or default, directory. And we're seeing the "absolute path" of my home directory.

/Users/tdyer

Definition: Absolute path

An absolute path shows the location of the files and directories within the system's file system.

Absolute paths:

• Always start with a leading slash, '/'
• Are relative to the root directory of the file system.

Definition: Root directory

Is the top level directory in the tree structure that makes up your project or the file system.

Open up the Finder and go to the root directory of your filesystem.

Find your home directory in the filesystem. Hint: use the absolute file path returned from the pwd above to find this.

Create a project.

We're going to create or make a directory, mkdir, in our home directory that will contain all the files, directories, etc for this project.

$ mkdir MortStore

This will make a directory named "MortStore" in my home directory. See mkdir is make directory, amazing!

Lets change into the "root", or top directory of your project. Not the root of the filesystem, the root of this new project.

$ cd MortStore

This will change directory, cd into the MortStore directory. This directory will hold all the files and such for your project.

Let's see what the contents of this directory are.

$ ls

This will list, ls, all the files and subdirectories in the MortStore directory. None yet.

Let's create a README file that will be a high level description of this project.

$ touch README

This will create an empty file, using touch, that will be named README if one doesn't already exist.

Let's look at all the files our project, only the empty README right now.

$ ls
README
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 tdyer  staff  0 Sep 25 01:55 README

ls -l will list the contents of the current directory in "long" form.

It shows the permissions to the files and directories, -rw-r--r--. Followed by number of links, 1, the owner name, tdyer , the group name, staff , the number of bytes in file, 0 and the last modified date/time.

Add Project features

From here on we are going to use BOTH the command line and the Sublime text editor to view the project and modify the project.

Open the project up in Sublime

$ pwd
/Users/tdyer/MortStore
$ 
$ subl .

This will open the Sublime Text Editor for the project in this current directory.

Definition: The The dot, '.' and dotdot, '..' directory.

Notice that when we view the contents of this directory with ls -al we view all the files, including hidden files. The dot directory is just another way to refer to the current directory and the dotdot directory is another way to refer to the current directory's parent directory.

Add the below text to to the README file and save it using Sublime.

Morty's Hardware
Lawn and Garden - Patio furniture, Hoses, Rakes, Shovels.
Plumbing - Toilets, Sinks, Tube and Showers, Pipes, Fittings, Solder
Electrical - Fuses, Lighting, Batteries, Switches, Wiring.
Tools - Hand Tools, Power Tools, Wet/Dry Vacuums, Work Benches.
Hardware - Door and Window, Fasteners.

Go back to the Terminal and show the contents of the root directory.

$ pwd
$ ls
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 tdyer  staff  306 Sep 25 02:18 README
$ cat README

cat will print the contents of the file README. This is just to check that you modified the right file in Sublime. Sometimes we get confused about which file we're editing.

Create department directories.

Create subdirectories for each department.

$ mkdir LawnGarden
$ mkdir Plumbing
$ mkdir Electrical
$ mkdir Tools
$ mkdir Hardware

View all files in your project, recursively

$ ls -lR

-R will recurse through all the subdirectories and run ls -l to show all the files and subdirectories of the current directory.

Determine that the view your seeing from ls -lR EXACTLY matches with the view of your project your seeing in Sublime.

Create inventory files.

In Sublime, create a file that will track the inventory for each department.

The files will be named inventory.txt and there contents will be a comma seperated file (CSV) in each department's directory.

In LawnGarden/inventory.csv add:

Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month
Shovel, 1, 11,74.33,13
Rake,2,5,35.99,0.5
Hose,3,19,16.99,3

In Plumbing/inventory.csv:

Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month
Toilet,4,3,249.99,1
Solder,5,88,5.99,33
Sinks,6,5,299.99,.2

In Electrical/inventory.csv:

Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month
Fuses,7,1024,1.99,640
Batteries,8,100,4.99,204
Switchs,9,29,14.50,18

In Tools/inventory.csv:

Item,ProdNum,Quantity,Price,Sold Per Month
Hand Saw,10,9,77.99,2
Drill,11,67,34.99,15
Wet Vac,12,2,114.50,0.1

Create department staff files.

Now create a file in each directory that will capture the current employees working in each department.

In LawnGarden/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role
Jack Sprat,978-251-2384,[email protected],manager
Moe Brown,617-589-8977,[email protected], associate

In Plubming/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role
Brian Behan,978-668-2344,[email protected],manager
Richy Havens,617-812-7312,[email protected], associate

In Electrical/staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role
Joy Gillis,978-238-9894,[email protected],manager
Laura Havens,617-763-5542,[email protected], associate

In staff.csv:

Name,Phone,Email,Role
Tom Smith,888-989-777,[email protected], associate
Meg Brown,978-453-8984,[email protected],manager

Run ls -R and check it against the structure of your project shown in Sublime. Should be the same.

Oops, looks like the last staff file we created was in the root of the directory. Lets move it into the Tools directory.

$ pwd 
$ mv staff.csv Tools/.

We are using the move command. The dot after the directory just indicates that the destination file should also be named inventory.csv.

Create department notice files.

Create a notice.txt file in each directory to communicate with the employees in each department.

$ pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir)
$ touch notice.txt
$ mv notice.txt Tools/.
$ cp Tools/notice.txt Electrical/.
$ cp Tools/notice.txt Plumbing/read_this.txt 
$

Here we using the copy unix command, cp.

Create products file

Let's create a file that will contain product information.

touch products.csv

Use Sublime to add these products, just cut and paste here.

Lawn and Garden - Patio furniture, Hoses, Rakes, Shovels.
Plumbing - Toilets, Sinks, Tube and Showers, Pipes, Fittings, Solder
Electrical - Fuses, Lighting, Batteries, Switches, Wiring.
Tools - Hand Tools, Power Tools, Wet/Dry Vacuums, Work Benches.
Hardware - Door and Window, Fasteners.

Oh, nevermind. Don't like how this is done lets remove the file.

rm products.csv

You Do

Create a cheat sheet of the unix commands that we've used so far. I like to these kinds of files for reference.

I want each of you to describe each command in your own words. Don't just cut and paste from some definition on the web!

Use whatever system that works for you, Evernote, plain text files (my favorite), tatoos, whatever.

Show the final version to an instructor or DIR

We do

Search for a term

I'm looking for the phone number for an employee named Tom. I'm not sure what his last name is or what department he works in?

$ grep -R Tom *
$ grep -R Tom */*.csv
$ grep -R Tom */staff*

I'm using grep to search for Tom. First I'm going to search for Tom in every file recursively in my project using grep -R Tom *. Then I'm going to only look in CSV files. Finally, I'm going to look only in files that start with the characters 'staff'.

Notice the '*'. This is something called a Regular Expression, aka regex. You can think of it as a kind of wild card. We'll learn more about this later.

Search for a file

Ok now I want to find all the staff CSV files in my project.

$ pwd (Make sure your in the project root dir)
$ find . -name '*.csv'

find is a pretty useful command that will allow one to find a file by name, partial name, modified or creation date. It has many options that can be it complex but very useful

This will look for any file that ends in .csv in the current directory and all descendent directories.

Look for these files in Sublime using it's file search features.

Finally

Morty has been unusually quite, but now he speaks up.

Wow, this is crazy. Man, ls, cp, rm, mkdir, touch I'll never remember all this stuff!

That's right Morty. Just.

$ man ls
$
$ man cp
$ man find

Just use the manual command, man to find more info!. You can even.

man man

You Do

Create a project to track song information for a record company.

The songs should be grouped by genre. Let's say Rock, Jazz, Blues and Dubstep. Yes, you will need to create directories for each genre.

Create between one and four files in these directories, using touch, where each file will contain the following infomation about one song.

Title, Song Duration (Minutes), Price (dollars), Artist Name.

Create a couple of songs in each file.

Use mv to move a song file from Rock to some other directory.

Use cp followed by rm to move a file from Dubstep to Blues.

Change into each directory and use ls and ls -al to view all the files in the directory.

Change into the root directory and use ls -alR to view all the files in the project.

For each of the above commands, (mv, cp, rm, touch), perform the equivalent operation in Sublime.

References

Teaching Unix

Unix Cheat Sheet

Unix Power Tools