Exercising UNIX Influence Effectively

There are many benefits of becoming familiar with UNIX. These include securing information stored in your home directory, file-sharing when working on team projects, backing up data, and social benefits like real-time messaging and finding out people's contact information.

The most important advantage of being familiar with UNIX is being able to set file permissions. This can prevent people from copying and/or reading private information that you've stored in your Leland account. Think about research papers, final projects, team communications, ... If you don't have your own computer, you can safely store your work in your home folder without worrying about someone accidentally deleting it, not being able to use the same computer every time, or the disk drive eating your disk. Your account can also serve as a safe place to back up essential files in case your computer ever crashes or catches a virus.

Another compoment of UNIX that comes in handy is file sharing. You can be working at home and then go over to work at computer cluster to meet with your partner. Instead of transporting the project on disk (which can be lost or ruined) you can just save it into your account and call it up at Tressider using MacLeland to mount your home folder. This is also convenient when you work with large files and you can't easily save the data onto a floppy diskette. UNIX makes group projects easier too. You can set the permission to grant access to files to your group. That way you don't have to keep e-mailing the files to everyone and they can have access to the latest version and contribute to it faster. UNIX allows you to print to remote printers on the network, which comes is helpful if you don't have your own printer or if you printer breaks down.

At Stanford, there are also many applications that are offered for free if you use an UNIX workstation, like Matlab, which is a math application, or a C compiler. In fact a good deal of UNIX software is free, including the UNIX OS itself (like Linux and FreeBSD). This could save you a good deal of dough (which we could all use a little more of every now and then).

The last beneifts are socially related. When you telnet to one of the servers, you can zwrite your friends who are also logged in, sweetfinger people to see what they're up to and how long they've been away from their computer. A friend of mine also told me that you can turn it into a great caller-id application (but don't ask me how, I have no idea).

So, you see, learning UNIX (as painful as it may seem) has a good deal of benefits. Enjoy! =)

[The Birth of UNIX] [How the Organization Works] [Navigating through UNIX] [Transfering Information Through Middlemen] [Examples] References]
© Tina Hsiu-man Young, Nov. 1999