These questions are designed for users who will be taking
the Beginning Perl for Programmers course in a Unix lab environment.
If you are taking the course in a Microsoft environment, please
apply the relevant cultural shifts, particularly to questions 2, 3, and 4.
Have you ever programmed before, using something like shell scripts, C,
Pascal, or Java? (Word processor or spreadsheet macros do not count.)
Do you know how to login to your system?
Do you know where your shell's start-up files reside?
Do you know how to edit a file with a text editor, like vi, or
emacs, or UltraEdit? (Notepad doesn't count.)
From the command line (on Unix, your shell; on Microsoft, sometimes
known as the "DOS prompt"), do you know how to display, list out, print,
copy, rename, and remove files?
Do you know what your path variable is and how to change it?
Do you know how to use your shell to redirect a command's
input or output? Can you use pipes?
Do you know how to examine and alter the permissions on a file?