i6 Services: Interaction with i6

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For information about connecting to i6 in order to interact with it, see our Connect page.

SSH Connections

If you connect to i6 via SSH, you are in an instance of a shell on i6.  You can execute commands within the shell to do various common tasks.  What follows are some common commands to do some common tasks:

Command	Description
ls -l	View the contents of your current directory
ls -la	View the contents of your current directory and include hidden "dot" files
pwd	Determine your current location
mv file newfile	Move a file from file to newfile. Note that this is effectively how you rename files in Linux
cd  directory	Change directories into directory
cd	Return to your home directory
mkdir directory	Make a new directory directory
rmdir directory	Remove an empty directory directory
rm file	Delete file
rm -rf directory	Delete a directory directory and all of its contents at once.  WARNING: There's no going back after you execute this, so be careful.
cp file newfile	Copy file to newfile
vim file	Open file for text editing.  Consult vim's documentation for basic usage
passwd	Change your password
man cmd	Use this command wh/strong>ere cmd is a Unix command to view the manual regarding that command.  ex. "man cp" to read about copying files

Permissions can also be modified through an SSH connection using commands similar to the above, but this section requires a little bit more description. The basic command is "chmod", however you need to provide accurate arguments to tell the system what permissions to grant on a file or directory.  Permission arguments are generally set using octal codes. A handy tool for determining what octal codes correspond with what permissions, see the Unix Permissions Calculator.

For your first index.html file, a reasonable permission setting is one in which you have the ability to read and write, but the rest of the world has the ability to read only. For example: chmod 0644 index.html

Unix permissions can be tricky, and octal codes are certainly not intuitive. If you are receiving "Forbidden" messages on your website, most likely some file or directory does not have the correct permissions. Take some time to review your permissions, keeping in mind that the world (the "other" permissions) needs the ability to read your files.

SFTP Connections

If you are using an SFTP client, these days you can generally click and drag files from your computer into the SFTP client once a connection to i6 has been established.  More details about what you can do and how you do it will depend on which SFTP client you're using, so you should seek Google's help in finding the documentation for your SFTP client.