1 Objectives

This lecture covers:

File and directory permissions in more detail and how these can be changed.
Ways to examine the contents of files.
How to find files when you don't know how their exact location.
Ways of searching files for text patterns.
How to sort files.
Tools for compressing files and making backups.
Accessing floppy disks and other removable media.

2 File and Directory Permissions

Permission
read
write
execute

File
User can look at the contents of
the file
User can modify the contents of
the file
User can use the filename as a
UNIX command

Directory
User can list the files in the directory

User can create new files and remove

existing files in the directory
User can change into the directory, but
cannot list the files unless (s)he has read
permission. User can read files if (s)he
has read permission on them.
Fig 1: Interpretation of permissions for files and directories

As we have seen in the previous chapter, every file or directory on a UNIX system has three
types of permissions, describing what operations can be performed on it by various
categories of users. The permissions are read (r), write (w) and execute (x), and the three
categories of users are user/owner (u), group (g) and others (o). Because files and
directories are different entities, the interpretation of the permissions assigned to each
differs slightly, as shown in Fig .1.
File and directory permissions can only be modified by their owners, or by the superuser
(root), by using the chmod system utility.

chmod (change [file or directory] mode)

$ chmod options files

chmod accepts options in two forms. Firstly, permissions may be specified as a sequence of
3 octal digits (octal is like decimal except that the digit range is 0 to 7 instead of 0 to 9).
Each octal digit represents the access permissions for the user/owner, group and others
respectively. The mappings of permissions onto their corresponding octal digits is as follows:
----x
-w-wx
r-r-x
rwrwx
For example the command:
$ chmod 600 private.txt

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

sets the permissions on private.txt to rw------- (i.e. only the owner can read and write to the
file).
Permissions may be specified symbolically, using the symbols u (user), g (group), o (other), a
(all), r (read), w (write), x (execute), + (add permission), - (take away permission) and =
(assign permission). For example, the command:
$ chmod ug=rw,o-rw,a-x *.txt
sets the permissions on all files ending in *.txt to rw-rw---- (i.e. the owner and users in the
file's group can read and write to the file, while the general public do not have any sort of
access).
chmod also supports a -R option which can be used to recursively modify file permissions,
e.g.
$ chmod -R go+r play
will grant group and other read rights to the directory play and all of the files and directories
within play.

chgrp (change group)

$ chgrp group files

can be used to change the group that a file or directory belongs to. It also supports a -R
option.

3 Inspecting File Content

Besides cat there are several other useful utilities for investigating the contents of files:

file filename(s)

file analyzes a file's contents for you and reports a high-level description of what type of file
it appears to be:
$ file myprog.c letter.txt webpage.html
myprog.c:
letter.txt:

C program text
English text

webpage.html: HTML document text

file can identify a wide range of files but sometimes gets understandably confused (e.g.
when trying to automatically detect the difference between C++ and Java code).

head, tail filename

head and tail display the first and last few lines in a file respectively. You can specify the
number of lines as an option, e.g.
$ tail -20 messages.txt
$ head -5 messages.txt

tail includes a useful -f option that can be used to continuously monitor the last few lines of
a (possibly changing) file. This can be used to monitor log files, for example:
$ tail -f /var/log/messages
continuously outputs the latest additions to the system log file.

objdump options binaryfile

objdump can be used to disassemble binary files - that is it can show the machine language
instructions which make up compiled application programs and system utilities.

od options filename (octal dump)

od can be used to displays the contents of a binary or text file in a variety of formats, e.g.
$ cat hello.txt
hello world
$ od -c hello.txt
0000000 h e l l o
w o r l d \n
0000014
$ od -x hello.txt
0000000 6865 6c6c 6f20 776f 726c 640a
0000014
There are also several other useful content inspectors that are non-standard (in terms of
availability on UNIX systems) but are nevertheless in widespread use. They are summarised
in Fig. 2.
File type

Typical extension

Portable Document Format .pdf

Postscript Document
.ps
DVI Document
JPEG Image
.jpg
GIF Image
.gif
MPEG movie
.mpg
WAV sound file
HTML document
Fig 2: Other file

Content viewer

acroread
ghostview
.dvi
xdvi
xv
xv
mpeg_play
.wav
realplayer
.html
netscape
types and appropriate content viewers.

4 Finding Files
There are at least three ways to find files when you don't know their exact location:

find

If you have a rough idea of the directory tree the file might be in (or even if you don't and
you're prepared to wait a while) you can use find:
$ find directory -name targetfile -print
find will look for a file called targetfile in any part of the directory tree rooted at directory.
targetfile can include wildcard characters. For example:
$ find /home -name "*.txt" -print 2>/dev/null

will search all user directories for any file ending in ".txt" and output any matching files (with
a full absolute or relative path). Here the quotes (") are necessary to avoid filename
expansion, while the 2>/dev/null suppresses error messages (arising from errors such as not
being able to read the contents of directories for which the user does not have the right
permissions).
find can in fact do a lot more than just find files by name. It can find files by type (e.g. -type f
for files, -type d for directories), by permissions (e.g. -perm o=r for all files and directories
that can be read by others), by size (-size) etc. You can also execute commands on the files
you find. For example,
$ find . -name "*.txt" -exec wc -l '{}' ';'
counts the number of lines in every text file in and below the current directory. The '{}' is
replaced by the name of each file found and the ';' ends the -exec clause.
For more information about find and its abilities, use man find and/or info find.

which (sometimes also called whence) command

If you can execute an application program or system utility by typing its name at the shell
prompt, you can use which to find out where it is stored on disk. For example:
$ which ls
/bin/ls

locate string

find can take a long time to execute if you are searching a large filespace (e.g. searching
from / downwards). The locate command provides a much faster way of locating all files
whose names match a particular search string. For example:
$ locate ".txt"
will find all filenames in the filesystem that contain ".txt" anywhere in their full paths.
One disadvantage of locate is it stores all filenames on the system in an index that is usually
updated only once a day. This means locate will not find files that have been created very
recently. It may also report filenames as being present even though the file has just been
deleted. Unlike find, locate cannot track down files on the basis of their permissions, size
and so on.

5 Finding Text in Files

grep (General Regular Expression Print)

$ grep options pattern files

grep searches the named files (or standard input if no files are named) for lines that match a
given pattern. The default behaviour of grep is to print out the matching lines. For example:
$ grep hello *.txt
searches all text files in the current directory for lines containing "hello". Some of the more
useful options that grep provides are:

-c (print a count of the number of lines that match), -i (ignore case), -v (print out the lines
that don't match the pattern) and -n (printout the line number before printing the matching
line). So
$ grep -vi hello *.txt
searches all text files in the current directory for lines that do not contain any form of the
word hello (e.g. Hello, HELLO, or hELlO).
If you want to search all files in an entire directory tree for a particular pattern, you can
combine grep with find using backward single quotes to pass the output from find into grep.
So
$ grep hello `find . -name "*.txt" -print`
will search all text files in the directory tree rooted at the current directory for lines
containing the word "hello".
The patterns that grep uses are actually a special type of pattern known as regular
expressions. Just like arithmetic expressions, regular expressions are made up of basic
subexpressions combined by operators.
The most fundamental expression is a regular expression that matches a single character.
Most characters, including all letters and digits, are regular expressions that match
themselves. Any other character with special meaning may be quoted by preceding it with a
backslash (\). A list of characters enclosed by '[' and ']' matches any single character in that
list; if the first character of the list is the caret `^', then it matches any character not in the
list. A range of characters can be specified using a dash (-) between the first and last items
in the list. So [0-9] matches any digit and [^a-z] matches any character that is not a letter.
The caret `^' and the dollar sign `$' are special characters that match the beginning and
end of a line respectively. The dot '.' matches any character. So
$ grep ^..[l-z]$ hello.txt
matches any line in hello.txt that contains a three character sequence that ends with a
lowercase letter from l to z.
egrep (extended grep) is a variant of grep that supports more sophisticated regular
expressions. Here two regular expressions may be joined by the operator `|'; the resulting
regular expression matches any string matching either subexpression. Brackets '(' and ')'
may be used for grouping regular expressions. In addition, a regular expression may be
followed by one of several repetition operators:
`?' means the preceding item is optional (matched at most once).
`*' means the preceding item will be matched zero or more times.
`+' means the preceding item will be matched one or more times.
`{N}' means the preceding item is matched exactly N times.
`{N,}' means the preceding item is matched N or more times.
`{N,M}' means the preceding item is matched at least N times, but not more than M times.
For example, if egrep was given the regular expression
'(^[0-9]{1,5}[a-zA-Z ]+$)|none'
it would match any line that either:

begins with a number up to five digits long, followed by a sequence of one or more
letters or spaces, or
contains the word none

You can read more about regular expressions on the grep and egrep manual pages.
Note that UNIX systems also usually support another grep variant called fgrep (fixed grep)
which simply looks for a fixed string inside a file (but this facility is largely redundant).

6 Sorting files
There are two facilities that are useful for sorting files in UNIX:

sort filenames

sort sorts lines contained in a group of files alphabetically (or if the -n option is specified)
numerically. The sorted output is displayed on the screen, and may be stored in another file
by redirecting the output. So
$ sort input1.txt input2.txt > output.txt
outputs the sorted concentenation of files input1.txt and input2.txt to the file output.txt.

uniq filename

uniq removes duplicate adjacent lines from a file. This facility is most useful when combined
with sort:
$ sort input.txt | uniq > output.txt

7 File Compression and Backup

UNIX systems usually support a number of utilities for backing up and compressing files. The
most useful are:

tar (tape archiver)

tar backs up entire directories and files onto a tape device or (more commonly) into a single
disk file known as an archive. An archive is a file that contains other files plus information
about them, such as their filename, owner, timestamps, and access permissions. tar does
not perform any compression by default.
To create a disk file tar archive, use
$ tar -cvf archivenamefilenames
where archivename will usually have a .tar extension. Here the c option means create, v
means verbose (output filenames as they are archived), and f means file.To list the contents
of a tar archive, use
$ tar -tvf archivename
To restore files from a tar archive, use
$ tar -xvf archivename

cpio

cpio is another facility for creating and reading archives. Unlike tar, cpio doesn't
automatically archive the contents of directories, so it's common to combine cpio with find
when creating an archive:
$ find . -print -depth | cpio -ov -Htar > archivename
This will take all the files in the current directory and the
directories below and place them in an archive called archivename.The -depth option
controls the order in which the filenames are produced and is recommended to prevent
problems with directory permissions when doing a restore.The -o option creates the archive,
the -v option prints the names of the files archived as they are added and the -H option
specifies an archive format type (in this case it creates a tar archive). Another common
archive type is crc, a portable format with a checksum for error control.
To list the contents of a cpio archive, use
$ cpio -tv < archivename
To restore files, use:
$ cpio -idv < archivename
Here the -d option will create directories as necessary. To force cpio to extract files on top of
files of the same name that already exist (and have the same or later modification time), use
the -u option.

compress, gzip

compress and gzip are utilities for compressing and decompressing individual files (which
may be or may not be archive files). To compress files, use:
$ compress filename
or
$ gzip filename
In each case, filename will be deleted and replaced by a compressed file called filename.Z or
filename.gz. To reverse the compression process, use:
$ compress -d filename
or
$ gzip -d filename

8 Handling Removable Media (e.g. floppy disks)

UNIX supports tools for accessing removable media such as CDROMs and floppy disks.

mount, umount

The mount command serves to attach the filesystem found on some device to the filesystem
tree. Conversely, the umount command will detach it again (it is very important to

remember to do this when removing the floppy or CDROM). The file /etc/fstab contains a list
of devices and the points at which they will be attached to the main filesystem:

$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto

rw,user,noauto 0 0

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0

In this case, the mount point for the floppy drive is /mnt/floppy and the mount point for the
CDROM is /mnt/cdrom. To access a floppy we can use:
$ mount /mnt/floppy
$ cd /mnt/floppy
$ ls (etc...)
To force all changed data to be written back to the floppy and to detach the floppy disk from
the filesystem, we use:
$ umount /mnt/floppy

mtools

If they are installed, the (non-standard) mtools utilities provide a convenient way of
accessing DOS-formatted floppies without having to mount and unmount filesystems. You
can use DOS-type commands like "mdir a:", "mcopy a:*.* .", "mformat a:", etc. (see the
mtools manual pages for more details).