Learning Objectives

Are you logged into the FASRC cluster and on a compute node?

You need to be logged into the FASRC cluster, and be on a compute node to run through this lesson. If you are, please proceed to the next section!

If you are not logged into the cluster or are not on a compute node, please follow the steps below as appropriate:

  1. Log in using ssh username@login.rc.fas.harvard.edu and enter your password and two-factor auth code.
  2. Once you are on the login node, use salloc -p test -t 0-2:30 --mem 1G to get on a compute node.
  3. Proceed to the next section once your command prompt no longer has the word login in it.

Saving time with wildcards and other shortcuts

Wild cards

The “*” wildcard:

Navigate to the ~/unix_lesson/raw_fastq directory. This directory contains FASTQ files from a next-generation sequencing dataset.

The “*” character is a shortcut for “everything”. Thus, if you enter ls *, you will see all of the contents of a given directory. Now try this command:

$ ls *fq

This lists every file that ends with a fq. Try this command:

$ ls /usr/bin/*.sh

This lists every file in /usr/bin directory that ends in the characters .sh. “*” can be placed anywhere in your pattern. For example:

$ ls Mov10*fq

This lists only the files that begin with ‘Mov10’ and end with fq.

So how does this actually work? The Shell (bash) considers an asterisk “*” to be a wildcard character that can match one or more occurrences of any character, including no character.

Tip - An asterisk/star is only one of the many wildcards in Unix, but this is the most powerful one and we will be using this one the most for our exercises.

The “?” wildcard:

Another wildcard that is sometimes helpful is ?. ? is similar to * except that it is a placeholder for exactly one position. Recall that * can represent any number of following positions, including no positions. To highlight this distinction lets look at a few examples. First, try this command:

$ ls /bin/d*

This will display all files in /bin/ that start with “d” regardless of length. However, if you only wanted the things in /bin/ that start with “d” and are two characters long then you can use:

$ ls /bin/d?

Lastly, you can chain together multiple “?” marks to help specify a length. In the example below, you would be looking for all things in /bin/ that start with a “d” and have a name length of three characters.

$ ls /bin/d??

Exercise

Do each of the following using a single ls command without navigating to a different directory.

  1. List all of the files in /bin that start with the letter ‘c’
  2. List all of the files in /bin that contain the letter ‘a’
  3. List all of the files in /bin that end with the letter ‘o’

BONUS: Using one command to list all of the files in /bin that contain either ‘a’ or ‘c’. (Hint: you might need to use a different wildcard here. Refer to this post for some ideas.)

Shortcuts

There are some very useful shortcuts that you should also know about.

Home directory or “~”

Dealing with the home directory is very common. In shell, the tilde character, “~”, is a shortcut for your home directory. Let’s first navigate to the raw_fastq directory (try to use tab completion here!):

$ cd
$ cd unix_lesson/raw_fastq

Then enter the command:

$ ls ~

This prints the contents of your home directory, without you having to type the full path. This is because the tilde “~” is equivalent to “/home/username”, as we had mentioned in the previous lesson.

Parent directory or “..”

Another shortcut you encountered in the previous lesson is “..”:

$ ls ..

The shortcut .. always refers to the parent directory of whatever directory you are in currently. So, ls .. will print the contents of unix_lesson. You can also chain these .. together, separated by /:

$ ls ../..

This prints the contents of /n/homexx/username, which is two levels above your current directory (your home directory).

Current directory or “.”

Finally, the special directory . always refers to your current directory. So, ls and ls . will do the same thing - they print the contents of the current directory. This may seem like a useless shortcut, but recall that we used it earlier when we copied over the data to our home directory.

To summarize, the commands ls ~ and ls ~/. do exactly the same thing. These shortcuts can be convenient when you navigate through directories!

Command History

You can easily access previous commands by hitting the arrow key on your keyboard, this way you can step backwards through your command history. On the other hand, the arrow key takes you forward in the command history.

Try it out! While on the command prompt hit the arrow a few times, and then hit the arrow a few times until you are back to where you started.

You can also review your recent commands with the history command. Just enter:

$ history

You should see a numbered list of commands, including the history command you just ran!

Only a certain number of commands can be stored and displayed with the history command by default but you can increase or decrease it to a different number. It is outside the scope of this workshop, but feel free to look it up after class.

NOTE: So far we have only run very short commands that have very few or no arguments. It would be faster to just retype it than to check the history. However, as you start to run analyses on the command-line you will find that the commands are longer and more complex, and the history command will be very useful then!

Cancel a command or task

Sometimes as you enter a command, you realize that you don’t want to continue or run the current line. Instead of deleting everything you have entered (which could be very long), you could quickly cancel the current line and start a fresh prompt with Ctrl + C.

$ # Run some random words, then hit "Ctrl + C". Observe what happens

Another useful case for Ctrl + C is when a task is running that you would like to stop. In order to illustrate this, we will briefly introduce the sleep command. sleep N simply pauses your command-line from additional entries for N seconds. If we would like to have the command-line not accept entries for 20 seconds, we could use:

$ sleep 20

While, your sleep command is running, you may decide that infact you do want to have your command-line back. To terminate the rest of the sleep command simply type:

Ctrl + C

This should terminate the rest of the sleep command. While this use may seem a bit silly, you will likely encounter many scenarios when you accidentally start running a task that you didn’t mean to start and Ctrl + C can be immensely helpful in stopping it.

Other handy command-related shortcuts

Exercise

  1. Checking the output of the history command, how many commands have you typed in so far?
  2. Use the arrow key to check the command you typed before the history command. What is it? Does it make sense?
  3. Type several random characters on the command prompt. Can you bring the cursor to the start with + ? Next, can you bring the cursor to the end with + ? Finally, what happens when you use + ?

Summary: Commands, options, and keystrokes covered

~           # home dir
.           # current dir
..          # parent dir
*           # wildcard
ctrl + c    # cancel current command
ctrl + a    # start of line
ctrl + e    # end of line
history

This lesson has been developed by members of the teaching team at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC). These are open access materials distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.