Introduction to UNIX for Biologists

Much of the bioinformatics software described in the other chapters of this book (for example, the GCG or EMBOSS programs; e.g., see Chapters 18, 19, and 24) is installed on computers that have a UNIX operating system, such as Sun Solaris or Linux. In this chapter, the reader will receive an introduction to using computers with the UNIX operating system. This is not a comprehensive course in UNIX, but is written for general users who want to work with UNIX computers and UNIX software. Note that the perspective used for this chapter is that of a biologist, not a computer scientist. After a general introduction, the reader will be presented with examples and tutorials that will demonstrate several tasks, such as file management or text editing, on UNIX computers using either the command line or the graphical windows interface. A table of simple but useful UNIX commands is included in Appendix 3.