An operating system is a considered a set of programs that schedule tasks, assign storage and presenting an interface to the user. There are many operating systems to choose from. Some are created for personal use, some for business use, and some can be used for both. One of the biggest differences is whether the operating system is open source or closed source. Operating systems are created with programming code. Programmers are responsible for writing the source code, which is compiled into executable code. This executable code is what creates the product ran on computers. An open source system is a system in which the source code is visible. A closed source system keeps the source code hidden.

System Differences

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the method is still a little different.

I realized Windows uses the ‘C:\ as the root of the file system whereas a UNIX environment the pathname, or absolute pathname is the root but since this is just an emulation essentially it really isn’t that hard to understand the file system because it is still dependent upon Windows, i.e. C:\Cygwin/home/WM/foo.txt, so this isn’t really that difficult to understand. After I figured out how the file system was going to work I opened up the Cygwin/X server to try and figure it out from there.

GUI v. Command Line and File Structures

At the command prompt the first thing I did in this experiment is enter in the % ls to figure out what is in the current working directory which there was of course nothing but I think that learning how to navigate and what the actual commands are, is half the battle. I noticed that there is a similar ‘% cd’ in UNIX whereas Windows has the same cd but they mean very different things, Windows is a change directory and UNIX is the current directory whereas UNIX’s change directory is cd directory so there is some similarities to an extent. As I pressed on I learned about some other core commands like the ‘pwd’ command which displays the path of the current directory I was in which is a helpful one for a newbie like me to this environment. I don’t want to go too in-depth about the commands but what I have learned here is that UNIX can be quite