Introduction

Linux is a very text file-oriented operating system. As we've learned most of the settings for the operating system are held in text files in the /etc directory and most of the commands that are used to manipulate the system take text input or give text output. Beause of this it's very important to be able to edit and manipulate text on the system which will be a key focus of this lab. In addition, we'll practice creating compressed files, which is useful for backing up files, and creating links between locations on the system.

Lab Procedure

Prerequisites

Open an SSH console to your Linux system using the PuTTY software, login with your standard user account

Text File Editing

Change to the /var/www/html directory which is where the Apache webserver stores it's site files by default.
Verify you can see an index.html file inside of this directory by listing the contents of the directory.
Open up a web browser on your host computer and verify that you can browse to the IP address of your Linux system and still see the "It works" page that you saw in lab 2 after installing Apache.
Before we start making any changes it's a good idea to save an unmodified copy of the file you'll be working on so make a copy of the index.html file and name the copy index.html.orig so that you can always copy it back if you make a mistake.
There are many different text editors available for Linux but systems almost always include some version of "vi" or "nano" so those are the two we'll focus on. In your ssh window open the index.html file in nano by running "nano index.html"
- NOTE: Because your user does not own this file you may need to edit the file as the superuser.
The nano text editor is fairly simple to use and you should now see the contents of the index.html file on your screen. Try navigating around the file with your arrow keys and changing the "It works" text to "Welcome to My Linux Webserver"
Basic instructions for using nano abound on the Internet. You can get a basic introduction here but it basically comes down to the menu lines at the bottom of the screen showing what your options are. The ^ character is commonly used to indicate the CTRL key so to exit the program (you will be prompted to save changes if you have made any) press CTRL-X or to save without exiting press CTRL-O and follow the prompts at the bottom of the screen.
Save your file with the changed text and then reload the page in your browser on your host system to see if the changes have taken effect.
Experiment with some of the nano menu options such as cutting and "un-cutting" lines of text and searching/replacing text. Once you are comfortable with the nano editor save your changes and exit.
Make a note of which user and group owns your index.html file.
Delete your index.html file and copy your index.html.orig file back to index.html
Try loading the website again and see if it's back to the original text. If you encounter an error it's possible that your index.html file is not readbale by the webserver account so you should use the appropriate command to set the index.html file back to the owner and group of the original file.
Now open the index.html file in vi using "vi index.html"
The vi editor is probably considered more powerful than nano but is less user friendly without the menu at the bottom and a COMMAND mode as well as an INSERT mode. In the COMMAND mode you cannot directly change the text of the file by typing which can be frustrating to new users. Read through the vi tutorial here and try making some edits to your webpage. Once you are familiar with how the vi editor works save your file and exit.

Command Output Manipulation

Change back to your home directory using ls ~
Run ls -al and notice the files in your home directory.
Now, run ls -al but redirect the output to a file using > filename. So for example, you would run ls -al > listfiles.txt
Notice how there is no command output. This is normal as you redirected the command output to the file listfiles.txt
Use cat to verify the contents of listfiles.txt Notice how it contains the exact same output as running ls -al in the command line.
Now, run ls -al /var/log. Notice how many files there are in the /var/log directory. Lets say we wanted to just know the information of the dmesg log files. For this, we would use a pipe and the grep command.
So, now run ls -al /var/log | grep dmesg. Notice how the output is suppressed to all files that contain the string dmesg.
Whats nice about pipes and redirects is that they can be used back to back in a command.
So lets say we have a senario where we want to get a file that contains all of the information from all .gz files in /var/log.
To do this, we would run ls -al /var/log | grep .gz > gzlogfiles.txt
Now pipe the file into less using cat gzlogfiles.txt | less
- NOTE: Remember that you are now viewing the file in the less program and will need to quite the program to return to a command line. Type the letter "q" to quit the less program.
Notice how this command is the exact same as running less gzlogfiles.txt.
See if you can figure out how to view the output of ls -al /var/log | grep .gz one page at a time without dumping it to a text file first.
Now remove the files gzlogfiles.txt and listfiles.txt that were created from this part of the lab.

Searching for Files in Linux

There are several ways to search for files on a Linux system. The simplest is to use the "find" command which searches through the system directory by directory for files which match your search string. You can specify many options for the find command which do things such as restrict to searching in one particular directory and it's sub-directories, etc.
Try running the command "find / -name syslog 2> /dev/null" which will search your entire drive for files with syslog in the name. Notice the 2> /dev/null on the end of the command. This redirects error messages ( 2> redirected stderr, > redirects stdout as discussed above) to the location /dev/null which is non-existing location/file where bits are just dropped from the system.
You should see some files identified which contain the name syslog. The problem is that the find command is very slow at moving through all the files on the system, in fact it may even appear to be frozen while searching slowly though the drive. If you have waited a while and are still not getting back to a command prompt you can press CTRL-C to force the find program to quit and return to a command prompt. This means the find program works just fine for searching through a few directories/files (such as your home directory might contain) but is not the best choice for searching the entire system.
If you want to learn more about advanced uses of the find command take a look at this tutorial.
A faster way to search the entire system is to use the locate command. This command searches a pre-built database of all files on the system which means it operates much faster than searching though files one at a time. There are two downsides to locate. First, it may not be pre-installed on many Linux systems so you may have to install it. Second, you need to build or update the database before you can search for files. New files are not automatically updated to the database so this only really works if you periodically remember to update the database. We'll explain how you can schedule that automatically in the future (hint, see the cron program).
Install the locate program using "sudo apt-get install locate"
Create an updated database of files on your system using the "sudo updatedb" command. Note, it will take a while for this program to find and index all the files on your system so give it a while to run. The advantage is after you do this you can search the database for many different files very quickly instead of waiting for each search as with the find command. We need to run the updatedb program as an administrator so that it can search though all locations on the system, including ones your user does not normally have access to.
Search for files with syslog in the name again but now using the command "locate syslog". You should see many files found with this name and it should happen quickly, much faster than with the find command.

Creating Archived/Compressed Files

If you get stuck or have any problems understanding why tar is functioning in a certain way you can find a number of introductory tutorials like this one about using tar on the Internet by searching for them

Create a new directory "experiments" in your home directory and enter this directory.
Create a GZipped TAR file of everything in your system log directory called logbackup1.tar.tz using the "tar -czvf logbackup1.tar.gz /var/log" command. Note that you will need to use root privileges to create all of the log backups in this section of the lab because some log files can not be read by a standard user.
- Note the lack of a slash at the end of the directory we are putting into the TAR file. In some older versions of TAR putting a slash on the end meant to put the files from that directory into the file but not the directory itself. When files like this were untarred they would dump all of the files into the current directory making a mess. By leaving the slash off the end we are telling TAR to put the log directory,as well as it's contents, into the TAR file so that when we extract it we will get a log directory made with the files going into it. Even though new versions of TAR automatically prevent you from creating TAR files without a directory path it is still best practice to make sure that you are including a directory as part of the TAR file.
Try extracting the files into your experiments directory, show a list of files as they are extracted
Check the contents of your experiments directory. What happened? If you extracted a tar file made this way you could potentially end up with several more levels of directories than you really want. In this case we got an extra "var" directory inside of experiments but if we were archiving something with a deeper path we would have even more extra subdirectories. You can actually see this during the tar file creation if you have verbose output enabled you saw that all the files being added to the tar had "var/log/" in front of the filename. There are at least two ways to handle this which we will look at.
Empty your experiments directory
If we are creating the TAR file manually we can avoid these extra parts to the path by paying attention to what directory we are in when we create the TAR file. This time change your working directory to "/var" first and then run the "tar -czvf ~/experiments/logbackup2.tar.gz log" command. Note the different output from the tar command. This time the filenames are prefixed only by "log/" but we also had to specify the full path, though we used the ~ shortcut to our current user's home directory) where we wanted to save the directory because we don't want to save it in the working directory this time.
Switch back to your experiments directory (hint, can you do this with a shortcut?) and then try extracting the files from logbackup2.tar.gz into your experiments directory, do not show a list of files as they are extracted this time.
Check the contents of your experiments directory. This time you should see that there is just one new subdirectory called log and all of the files are neatly placed inside of it. This is the type of extraction people normally want and expect from a tar file that is distributed.
Empty your experiments directory
If you want to have the same effect but without changing your working directory that is possible too. Try running the "tar -czvf ~/experiments/logbackup3.tar.gz -C /var log" command. This time it doesn't make any difference which directory on the system because we have again specified a full path for where to save the tar file and we have also told tar to change to the /var directory before adding the log directory to the file. This automates the process of manually changing directories like we did above.
Switch back to your experiments directory (hint, can you do this with a shortcut?) and then try extracting the files from logbackup2.tar.gz into your experiments directory, do not show a list of files as they are extracted this time.
Check the contents of your experiments directory. This time you should again see that there is just one new subdirectory called log and all of the files are neatly placed inside of it.
There are a number of other things you can do with tar such as creating slower but more highly compressed .bz2 bzip files, extracting single files (or directories or groups of files) from an archive, listing the contents of an archive without extracting (which can show you if a new subdirectory will be created), adding files to an existing archive, and preserving file ownership (only by extracting on the same system though) and permissions. You should read the manual page for tar and then try practicing some of these and be familiar with the many ways that tar can be used.

Working With Filesystem Links

If you get stuck or have any problems understanding how links are functioning in a certain way you can find a number of introductory tutorials like this one or more advanced tutorials on the Internet by searching for them.

Use root privileges to create a new directory in the root user's home directory (remember this is /root and not /home/root) called "documentation" and change the ownership permissions so that your standard user has permission to read, write, and execute as a member of a group which owns the documentation directory. You will also need to make sure that all system users have execute permission for the parent directory (/root) in order to access anything in it including the documentation directory.
Instead of needing to go into the /root/documentation directory all the time it would be more convenient if your user was able to reach that directory through a link in their own home directory. Run the "ln -s /root/documentation documentation" command inside your regular user's home directory (or if you're in a different working directory you can run the command as "ln -s /root/documentation ~/documentation" do you understand why?)
You should now see a soft link (also called symlink) in your home directory called documentation which points to the /root/documentation folder.
You should be able to cd into the link just like it was a real directory. In fact, if you use the "pwd" command to print your working directory while inside the link it will look like it's a directory. Almost all software on the system will interact with the link jsut as if it's a real directory.
Try creating some files and subdirectories inside of the link and then verify they are showing up in the real /root/documentation location as well. This should work correctly if your permissions are all set correctly.
If you remove the link (rm ~/documentation) from your home directory you should see that all of the files you created are still in /root/documentation
If you re-create the link you should be able to go back into ~/documentation and remove files and directories and see they are removed from the actual /root/documentation directory as well
You can also practice creating links to specific files as well as directories. Links do not override permissions so you need to have permission to read, write or execute the file or directory you are linking to just like if you actually changed to the real location of the item. Go ahead and practice creating and removing links until you have a good understanding of how links can be used.

Note: If you are using TAR to back up data, depending on exactly what you want to do you may want to use the -h or --dereference option which will follow the symlink and backup the data it contains. Normal behavior for tar would just be to back up the link, not the file(s) pointed to by the link. You should try creating some tar files of directories which contain symlinks, deleting the data the symlink points to and the extracting the tar file to some new location to see this in action if you are not confident that you understand this.

Franske ITC-2480 Lab 4

Contents