Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Saturday/CLI

Title
The command line, packages, and dependencies

Learning objectives

 * Have a general understanding of the meaning of frequently-seen paths: /usr /usr/bin /home etc.
 * Understand the purpose and basic use of package management tools.
 * Have familiarity with passing arguments to CLI programs (e.g., tar).
 * Preferably, understand that a text terminal can display "graphical" (e.g. via ncurses) programs.
 * Understand enough history of the command line to know it came "first", before GUIs.
 * Have enough understanding of the command line to succeed at the rest of the day's activities.
 * Become familiar with different ways of quitting command-line programs.

Lecture portion

 * Use a photo of teletypes connected to a serious UNIX server to explain what a "terminal" means.
 * Ask people what their experiences with the command line have been so far. (If necessary, skip pieces of the discussion.)
 * With a diagram of a directory hierarchy, discuss different paths like /home and /usr.
 * Explain the concept of "PATH". Point out that "." is usually not in the path by default.
 * Split the screen into half Nautilus, half Terminal, and show how they are different views of the same thing.
 * Explain that programs like "apt-get" install software, and to demonstrate this, use apt-get on the presentation machine to install something. Demonstrate where the resulting files went with dpkg -L. (Try to include a surprise /usr/sbin program.) Try executing a binary that got installed, and point out its location. Use apt-get remove to remove it. Point out that "yum" and "port" are similar tools.

Individual work

 * 1) Visit http://openhatch.org/missions/ and go all the way through the "tar" training mission.
 * 2) Visit Six ways to quit and learn a variety of ways to quit things!

Successful completion of these comprises the assessment.

Possible problems


 * Some students might already be extremely familiar with this material. It'd be nice to have some "extra credit".

Prerequisites

 * Figure this out