OSC HPC resources use an operating system called "Linux", which is a UNIX-based operating system, first released on 5 October 1991. Linux is by a wide margin the most popular operating system choice for supercomputing, with over 90% of the Top 500 list running some variant of it. In fact, many common devices run Linux variant operating systems, including game consoles, tablets, routers, and even Android-based smartphones.
While Linux supports desktop graphical user interface configurations (as does OSC) in most cases, file manipulation will be done via the command line. Since all jobs run in batch will be non-interactive, they by definition will not allow the use of GUIs. Thus, we strongly suggest new users become comfortable with basic command-line operations, so that they can learn to write scripts to submit to the scheduler that will behave as intended. We have provided some tutorials explaining basics from moving about the file system, to extracting archives, to modifying your environment, that are available for self-paced learning.
Linux Command Line Fundamentals
This tutorial teaches you about the linux command line and shows you some useful commands. It also shows you how to get help in linux by using the man and apropos commands.
Linux Tutorial
This tutorial guides you through the process of creating and submitting a batch script on one of our compute clusters. This is a linux tutorial which uses batch scripting as an example, not a tutorial on writing batch scripts. The primary goal is not to teach you about batch scripting, but for you to become familiar with certain linux commands that can be used either in a batch script or at the command line. There are other pages on the OSC web site that go into the details of submitting a job with a batch script.
Linux Shortcuts
This tutorial shows you some handy time-saving shortcuts in linux. Once you have a good understanding of how the command line works, you will want to learn how to work more efficiently.
Tar Tutorial
This tutorial shows you how to download tar (tape archive) files from the internet and how to deal with large directory trees of files.
