SAMIDHA SATPUTE

Curriculum

Introduction to Linux: 4 units, 34 lessons. Every student gets their own Ubuntu container, in the browser. Fifteen lessons have a live terminal in them, and nine are gated on a capture-the-flag challenge whose flag is only readable once the task has actually been done on the machine. Unit 1: What is Linux? What a kernel does between the hardware and the programs, where Linux came from, what the major distributions are each good for, how the filesystem is laid out under /, and the difference between an absolute and a relative path (plus the ~, . and .. shortcuts). Unit 2: Basic Commands Working in a terminal: case sensitivity, arguments, command history. Reading a command's own docs with --help and man. Looking around with cat, ls and pwd. Moving with cd. Creating and deleting with touch, mkdir and rm. Copying and relocating with cp and mv. Users, groups, and the owner and group stamped on every file. Reading permissions out of ls -l and changing them with chmod and chown. Editing files in nano. Searching file contents with grep, including recursively through a whole directory tree. Unit 3: Linux^2 Redirecting output with >, >> and 2>, and chaining commands with pipes. Counting with wc, sorting and deduplicating with sort and uniq, and tracking down files with find. Running commands as root with sudo, stopping processes with ps and kill, unpacking archives with tar and zip, history and keyboard shortcuts, and a first look at networking with ping and curl. Unit 4: sudo graduate One final challenge that pulls from the whole course. Assessment: multiple-choice questions throughout, plus nine capture-the-flag challenges (cat, ls, cd, grep, find, sudo, kill, tar, and the final) checked by the platform.