UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM

Operating System is the layer between the hardware and software

Operating system

An Operating System is responsible for the following functions:

Device management using device drivers Process management using processes and threads Inter-process communication Memory management File systems

Operating system(cont)..
In addition, all operating systems come with a set of standard utilities. The utilities allow common tasks to be performed such as:

being able to start and stop processes being able to organize the set of available applications organize files into sets such as directories view files and sets of files edit files rename, copy, delete files communicate between processes

Introduction to UNIX operating system

What is UNIX :
UNIX is an operating system. An operating system is the program that controls all the other parts of a computer system, both the hardware and the software. It allocates the computer's resources and schedules tasks. It allows you to make use of the facilities provided by the system. Every computer requires an operating system.

History of UNIX
Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie developed the first edition of Unix in 1969, which was used for text processing of patent documents. Fifth edition of Unix was released in 1973 and was written in C programming language, and from then on, Unix was become portable across different hardware platforms. History of Unix and other interesting facts are available form unix.org

Philosophy of UNIX
Unix is open source, flexible, scalable, portable, stable, secure and based on open standards. In Unix, programs are often designed to do one simple thing right. Unix provides ways for interconnecting these simple programs to work together and perform more complex tasks.. Today, while Microsoft holds large share of PC operating systems, the Unix/Linux systems lead the server market.

Types of UNIX
There are many different versions of UNIX, although they share common similarities. The most popular varieties of UNIX are Sun Solaris, GNU/Linux, and MacOS X

Features of UNIX :
UNIX is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system. Multiple users may have multiple tasks running simultaneously. This is very different than PC operating systems. UNIX is a machine independent operating system. Not specific to just one type of computer hardware. Designed from the beginning to be independent of the computer hardware. UNIX is a software development environment. Was born in and designed to function within this type of environment.

Unix architecture
The UNIX operating system is made up of three parts; the kernel, the shell and the programs.

The kernel
The kernel of UNIX is the hub of the operating system: it allocates time and memory to programs and handles the filestore and communications in response to system calls.

The Shell
Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system. Therefore, users tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space. It has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files.

Files and Directories

UNIX uses a hierarchy to store files
Files are simply a named collection of bytes Directories contain other files
juliana
Project

File1

File2

File3

Starting an UNIX terminal

To open an UNIX terminal window, click on the "Terminal" icon from Applications/Accessories menus.