Basic Linux Commands Exercise

BitCuratorEdu

Last Updated: January 18, 2022

About This Exercise

Author

Cal Lee

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Description

This hands-on exercise is meant to introduce students to basic Linux commands in the BitCurator environment. These slides are excerpted from Cal Lee’s SAA “Advanced Digital Forensics” class. The sample data referenced in these slides is available here: https://github.com/BitCurator/bcc-dfa-sample-data/

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Learning object type

Lesson plan/materials

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Learning objectives

This learning object might be used in a lesson to satisfy the following learning objectives:

• Practice using tools in the BitCurator Environment.

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Command Line Operations

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• Opens up many more possibilities, such

as:

• stringing tools together
• performing batch operations
• changing parameters from their default values
• using tools that are only available through the

command line (no GUI)

Some Considerations

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• Role of pipes – feed output from one process into another process
• Switches – settings that can be applied to a command (e.g. -a, -r)
• Argument – a specific piece of data that is processed by a program (e.g. a variable or fixed value)
• Regular expressions – used to find patterns (more on this later)
• Text created in Windows and Unix, even though they’re both ASCII, will encode new lines differently, so you may need to translate using a tool such as dos2unix or unix2dos.

Some Important Commands and Tasks

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• mkdir – make a directory
• cd – change the directory that you’re in [“cd ..” goes to the parent of the current directory]
• ls – list contents of a directory
• md5sum – generate cryptographic hashes
• cat – output content of a text file (can be concatenation of contents of two files)
• file – determine file types based on magic numbers
• strings – matches patterns in the text (ASCII) parts of a file (file can be binary)
• diff – compare two files
• hexdump – very basic (non-GUI) hex viewer

General Unix/Linux Tricks

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• man – manual page that explains how to run a command or some other technical information (e.g. ascii page)
• control-z – quit currently running program
• clear – clear the screen (hide text from previous

commands)

• Up arrow – cycles through previous commands, so you can rerun (or adapt) them
• Tab – hit this key after you’ve started typing a string that the operating system can fill in for you (e.g. a long file name)

Exercise – Basic Linux Commands

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• Copy files.zip to the desktop of your host computer
• If you haven’t done this already, add shared folder to BitCurator VM,

pointing to the desktop of the host

• Move files.zip to the BitCurator VM desktop

Open a command prompt in the BitCurator

environment

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Exercise – Basic Linux Commands

Exercise – Basic Linux Commands

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sudo apt-get install most

Gives you the right administrative permissions

Uses Advanced Packaging Tool to get the program

Exercise – Basic Linux Commands

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This resource was released by the BitCuratorEdu project and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Most resources from the BitCuratorEdu project are intentionally left with basic formatting and without project branding. We encourage educators, practitioners, and students to adapt these materials as much as needed and share them widely.

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The BitCuratorEdu project is a three-year effort funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study and advance the adoption of digital forensics tools and methods in libraries and archives through professional education efforts. This project is a partnership between Educopia Institute and the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and several Masters-level programs in library and information science.