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.
- Then, tell students to do the tasks in the "Individual work" section.
Individual work
- Visit http://openhatch.org/missions/ and go all the way through the "tar" training mission.
- 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