need to teach a unix "class"

V

vage

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 10, 2005
Messages
3,038
Ok so it's not really a class, its more just an hour of me teaching my co-workers some useful things in Unix that they don't know. The problem is, I don't really know either!! I mean, yeah I know more than them, but half the time I have to google it and find out the exact syntax of a command or something.

I've got a few things I can teach them like keyboard shortcuts, using tab to auto-fill in arguments (they type so fucking slow), how useful grep and pipes are, .bashrc and .profile, and the PS command. But I can't really think of anything else too specific that I could teach them. These are all guys in their 30's, only like 4 of them.

Anyone have any ideas that I could teach these guys? They know the very basics, but mostly just because they've read it in how-to's I've made for certain commands.
 
So what they're in their 30s. So am I. :p

People don't learn well by memorization. Pick common tasks ( like digging through the logs for something ) and teach them that. Have print outs to do common tasks that they can hold on to.

It's not what you know, it's how confident you are with the knowledge you have.
 
That sounds like enough to fill an hour to me. I'd also probably introduce how use a command line text editor, choosing your text editor of choice.
 
what are they going to be doing on *NIX?

teach around that
def hands on.
vi,grep, sed...
 
I wasn't trying to say that they are 30 so they can't learn, just giving you guys a frame of reference. I would assume teaching 30 year old adults would be different from teaching a few 19 year old co-ops.

Pretty much the main things we use our unix environment for is to run specific commands, everyone once in a while edit a file. They are familiar with vi editor, and I definitely want to focus on commands like grep and sed. I am throwing in the PS command so that they can see if the processes that they run are still going. Going to show them how to run things in the background, check to make sure they didn't hang, etc.

I really kind of just got thrown into teaching this, and I know I learned most of what I know through many many years of googling everything I had a question about, so that's usually what my suggestions are for people that ask me questions.
 
do stuff to monitor processes and system status, like strace; top -c; ps; vmstat; free; etc. Also maybe something about package management with up2date or yums and brief rundown on rpm's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top