Unix skills Proficiency requirement. One of the learning goals of this course is to
acquire a basic familiarity with the Unix operating system, especially tools useful
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Unix skills Proficiency requirement One of the learning goals of this course is to acquire a basic familiarity with the Unix operating system, especially tools useful for data analysis. I will require all students pass a ‘unix skills’ proficiency test to obtain credit for laboratory projects 5, 6 and 7. A 15-minute pass/fail proficiency test will be given to individual students the week of October . If you don’t pass, the test may be taken again after one week. (You may request a test beforehand if you already have these skills). Tutorials I will give a tutorial on Linux during class. There are also several good web-based tutorials, for example: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~ellard/libsq/ref/unixtut.html#shell http://www.ctssn.com/ Minimum Unix and Talon skill set 1. Ability to log on, logout, change password (passwd command). 2. Familiarity with general shell commands: date, ps, who 3. Familiarity with file-related shell commands: ls (-l) , cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir, cd, pwd, cat, more, man, grep, locate, chmod. 4. Familiarity with job control and I/O: redirection (>,>>), pipes (|), foreground/background processes (&, cntrl-z fg/bg commands) 5. Ability to edit text files using an editor (e.g., gedit, which is very similar to Windows Wordpad) 6. Ability to perform simple manipulations of column-based data using gawk (e.g. add/subtraction fixed numbers to a column, write only certain columns into an output file. 7. Ability to use relevant Talon software: fdecompress, pterrors, camera, photom, fitshdr. 8. Ability to plot column-based data using gnuplot (x,y,error), adding s, y label and title, and grid, using either points or connected lines. Sample Skill Quiz Tasks 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8.
Use an editor to make a file consisting of three columns: [x,y,σ] with 10 rows Use gawk to add a constant to all y values Use gnuplot to plot y vs. x with error bars. Move all files in a directory whose names contain xyz to a directory named dir-xyz (which needs to be created). Find all files in a directory that contain the word ‘test’ and delete them. Decompress a .fth (compressed FITS image file) and display using camera. Use camera to determine the celestial coordinates of reference and check stars and the target asteroid. Create an input file for photom starting with a set of images and a target object. Run photom and plot the resulting target and check star magnitudes using gnuplot.
