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+demo portion suggested outline

• Use a photo of teletypes connected to a serious UNIX server to explain what a "terminal" means, and why it's really a "terminal emulator".
• 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 core concepts behind the filesystem hierarchy standard: what's available at boot, /usr vs. /.
• 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 your own machine to install something.
  • Demonstrate where the resulting files went with dpkg -L.
  • Install something that puts its binary in /usr/sbin program, and show that it's not on the path by default, but can be run by specifying the path.
  • Maybe do the same for something in /usr/games.
• Explain the concept of dependencies, both build-dependencies and runtime depencies, perhaps by showcasing a package via packages.debian.org or via apt-cache show + apt-cache showsrc.
• Then, tell students to do the tasks in the "Individual work" section.

Individual work for students

1. Ask students to work through the Six ways to quit tutorial, and talk with a TA or module leader once they have completed it.
2. Ask students to work through the "Tar training mission". They start by visiting http://openhatch.org/missions/.

(Editor's note: In terms of assessment, this lesson's assessment is the student successfully completing the above.)

Prerequisites

• Figure this out