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COMS 326 pages
-- Unix intro (You are here.)
-- Using MyRU Files
COMS 104 pages

Just a little Unix (and computer history)

for COMS 326 Web Production students

by Bob Stepno

Most Web pages these days are created with Content Management Systems or dedicated Web page editors like Adobe's Dreamweaver or Apple's iWeb. However, you also can edit your http://www.radford.edu/~yourname Web (HTML) pages with the simplest of text editors, even edit them directly on the Web server, which is a Unix computer somewhere across campus. At Radford, you get there by connecting to your "H drive" or "Home" space using a "terminal" program. This page of mine tells you how.

On the Macintosh, the program is named "Terminal." If someone hasn't put a shortcut to it in the Dock, you should find it in the Applications folder, in its Utilities subfolder.

(By the way, Macintosh and Windows users generally use the word "folder"; Unix uses the word "directory" for the same space.)

Terminal opens a plain-text window on your screen in black and white, but its Preferences settings can change the size and color of the window and its display font. You can have more than one terminal window open. You can cut and paste plain text between other Macintosh applications and the terminal. And you can make the terminal window larger or smaller by holding the "command" key and pressing "+" or "-" (plus or minus). 

(Read an Optional history lesson about "terminals")

Underneath its fancy desktop, each of our lab Macintoshes is actually a Unix computer with the OS-X user interface running "on top" of Unix. "Terminal" takes you to the Unix level of the Macintosh, and you can use the terminal to connect to other Unix computers on the Internet. The Web server that we all see as http://www.radford.edu and the personal storage space we all see as an "H drive" is a server called "ruacad" when we connect with a terminal. Your H-drive is a folder with your e-mail name. Your public Web space is a folder inside that one, named "public_html."

With the terminal program, you can connect to Radford's Web server using the Unix operating system's Secure SHell program, ssh for short. (Unix systems like to have commands in all lower-case letters.) Since this class meets in a Mac lab, this page only has instructions for that system. On Windows computers, you may use an "ssh client" or "sftp" program rather than a simple terminal. Among them are PuTTY and TTSSH, which are both free. Google can find them for you.

Next: UNIX Commands, then Going Public | Or, for printing: All four pages in one.