Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, A

Praise for Mark Sobell's Books "I keep searching for books that collect everything you want to know about a subject in one place, and keep getting disappointed. Usually the books leave out some important topic, while others go too deep in some areas and must skim lightly over the others. A Practical Guide to Red Hatreg; Linuxreg; is one of those rare books that actually pulls it off. Mark G. Sobell has created a single reference for Red Hat Linux that cannot be beat! This marvelous text (with a 4-CD set of Linux Fedora Core 2 included) is well worth the price. This is as close to an 'everything you ever needed to know' book that I've seen. It's just that good and rates 5 out of 5." -Ray Lodato, Slashdot contributor "Mark Sobell has written a book as approachable as it is authoritative." -Jeffrey Bianchine, Advocate, Author, Journalist "Excellent reference book, well suited for the sysadmin of a linux cluster, or the owner of a PC contemplating installing a recent stable linux. Don't be put off by the daunting heft of the book. Sobell has striven to be as inclusive as possible, in trying to anticipate your system administration needs." -Wes Boudville, Inventor "A Practical Guide to Red Hatreg; Linuxreg; is a brilliant book. Thank you Mark Sobell." -C. Pozrikidis, University of California at San Diego "This book presents the best overview of the Linux operating system that I have found. . . . It should be very helpful and understandable no matter what the reader's background is: traditional UNIX user, new Linux devotee, or even Windows user. Each topic is presented in a clear, complete fashion and very few assumptions are made about what the reader knows. . . . The book is extremely useful as a reference, as it contains a 70-page glossary of terms and is very well indexed. It is organized in such a way that the reader can focus on simple tasks without having to wade through more advanced topics until they are ready." -Cam Marshall, Marshall Information Service LLC, Member of Front Range UNIX Users Group FRUUG, Boulder, Colorado "Conclusively, this is THE book to get if you are a new Linux user and you just got into RH/Fedora world. There's no other book that discusses so many different topics and in such depth." -Eugenia Loli-Queru, Editor in Chief, OSNews.com The Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference Ever, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples Covering Every Linux Distribution!To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master the shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Worse, most Linux references offer little more than prettied-up man pages. Now, there's a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book. This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it on any Linux system, now and for years to come. What's more, it's packed with hundreds of high-quality examples: better examples than you'll find in any other Linux guidebook. This is Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regula

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programmingexplains how to work with the Linux operating system from the command line. The first few chapters quickly bring readers with little computer experience up to speed. The rest of the book is appropriate for more experienced computer users. This book does not describe a particular release or distribution of Linux but rather pertains to all recent versions of Linux. Command line interface (CLI).In the beginning there was the command line (textual) interface (CLI), which enabled you to give Linux commands from the command line. There was no mouse or icons to drag and drop. Some programs, such as emacs , implemented rudimentary windows using the very minimal graphics available in the ASCII character set. Reverse video helped separate areas of the screen. Linux was born and raised in this environment. Naturally all of the original Linux tools were invoked from the command line. The real power of Linux still lies in this environment, which explains why many Linux professionals work exclusivelyfrom the command line. Using clear descriptions and lots of examples, this book shows you how to get the most out of your Linux system using the command line interface. Linux distributions.A Linux distribution comprises the Linux kernel, utilities, and application programs. Many distributions are available, including Debian, Red Hat, Fedora Core, SUSE, Mandriva (formerly Mandrake), KNOPPIX, and Slackware. Although the distributions differ from one another in various ways, all of them rely on the Linux kernel, utilities, and applications. This book is based on the code that is common to most distributions. As a consequence you can use it regardless of which distribution you are running. Overlap.If you read A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux : Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Second Edition,or a subsequent edition, you will notice some overlap between that book and the one you are reading now. The introduction, the appendix on regular expressions, and the chapters on the utilities (Chapter 3 of this book--notPart V), the filesystem, and programming tools are very similar in the two books. The three chapters that cover the Bourne Again Shell ( bash ) have been expanded and rewritten for this text. Chapters that appear in this book and but not in A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux, Second Edition,include those covering the vim and emacs editors, the TC Shell ( tcsh ), the gawk and sed languages, and Part V, which describes 80 of the most useful Linux utility programs in detail. Audience.This book is designed for a wide range of readers. It does not require programming experience, although some experience using a general-purpose computer is helpful. It is appropriate for the following readers: Studentstaking a class in which they use Linux Power userswho want to explore the power of Linux from command line Professionalswho use Linux at work System administratorswho need a deeper understanding of Linux and the tools that are available to them Computer science studentswho are studying the Linux operating system Programmerswho need to understand the Linux programming environment Technical executiveswho want to get a grounding in Linux Benefits.A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell