Using telnet, putty, or SSH to look at files and folders on the CUIP server

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Finding out what your file uploading path is

Your "personal web area" is located on the filesystem path /home/USERNAME/www/ or /home2/USERNAME/www/. For more on this, see the server introduction in About WIT

As indicated there, whether your web file area is in /home/ or /home2/ depends mostly on the date it was first set up (there have been a few moves based on usage patterns -- but if your location was changed on this basis you already know about it). But to avoid guesswork, I'll list these explicitly below.

If you're not covered in the listing below, or if it isn't ready-to-hand when you need to use it, you can determine your own or another user's home directly interactively from the server. There are two ways:

1. Log in via telnet or other program. (If you're not familiar with this step, see Files module .) In interaction with the Unix (Linux) operating system through a command "shell", you are at any moment considered to be "located" in some particular folder in the file system. Initially, just after you've made your telnet connection, your location will be your personal home folder. You can find out what its actual place in the filesystem is by issuing the command "pwd" (which stands for "print working directory"). Thus for example:

Last login: Mon Feb 12 15:15:29 2001 from tnt15b-69.focal-chi.corecomm.net
No mail.
[7:54am] mitchell@cuip:~ 201> pwd
/home/mitchell

This location corresponds to just the /home/USERNAME/ part; to get the upload area I still need to add the "www/", getting "/home/mitchell/www/".

2. You can find out the home directory (home folder) and a little bit of additional information on yourself or another user, with the "finger" command. [This command name seems to derive from the vernacular sense of "identify" or especially "identify to the authorities", as in "It was the Lady In Red who fingered Dillinger to the Fibbies."] Thus, to determine Craig's home folder, I run the command "finger cac" if I happen to know that's his username, or "finger craig" if I expect the system to look it up:

[8:26am] mitchell@cuip:~ 202> finger craig
Login: cac Name: Craig Cunningham
Directory: /home/cac Shell: /bin/tcsh
Last login Tue Feb 6 11:13 (CST) on ttyp3 from dhcp-aac-76-228
No mail.
No Plan.

(Gee, have you ever known Craig to be without a plan?) As before, that "/home/cac/" is just the /home/USERNAME/ part, and to determine his personal web upload area we would add on the "www/" part, getting "/home/cac/www/".

(By the way, is it crystal clear why *something* needs to be added to the filepath of your home folder to get the filepath for your personal web upload area? That wouldn't have to be so on a server where the *only* thing a user is allowed to do is have web files. But so long as there are other things one may do on the server, and hence some files you may want to store but not share out onto the World Wide Web, there needs to be some way of distinguishing these, and designating a special file location for web-served files was a pretty good solution.)

Note that the "/home/" vs "/home2/" distinction matters only for upload. For browsing, the distinction is gone, with the "tilde convention" indicating that it's a user's personal web area and the exact file path that far not playing a role. Thus the URLs for Craig's and my personal areas (both with /home/ homes) would be respectively http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/ and http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~mitchell/ , while for someone with a /home2/ home, such as Stu, the file area /home2/stuart/www/ corresponds to a browsing URL of http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~stuart/

Activity: Use "telnet" to look at your home directory and your www directory:

telnet cuip.uchicago.edu

enter username at prompt

enter password at prompt

you are now "in" your home directory

type ls (that's little LS) to see a list of files in the directory, or ls -l (that's dash-el) to see more detail (a "long" listing)

the "www" you see is your public HTML directory.

type cd www to switch to the www directory.

type ls (that's little LS) again. This will show all your web files. (If it's empty, well, that's what you're here to learn!!!)

You will learn more Unix commands when you do the FTP module.

 

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