A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, 2nd Edition

For use with all versions of Linux, including Ubuntu,™ Fedora,™ openSUSE,™ Red Hat,® Debian, Mandriva, Mint, and now OS X, too!

• Get more done faster, and become a true Linux guru by mastering the command line!
• Learn from hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples
• NEW! Coverage of the Mac OS X command line and its unique tools
• NEW! Expert primer on automating tasks with Perl

The Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples for Every Distribution–Now Covers OS X and Perl, Too!

To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master 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. 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 with any Linux system, now and for years to come. Use Macs, too? This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of the Mac OS X command line, including essential OS X-only tools and utilities other Linux/UNIX books ignore.

Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, this book gives you 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 regular expressions. Sobell has also added an outstanding new primer on Perl, the most important programming tool for Linux admins seeking to automate complex, time-consuming tasks.

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Second Edition, is the only book to deliver

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you’ll actually need to perform
• Deeper insight, based on Sobell’s immense knowledge of every Linux and OS X nook and cranny
• A start-to-finish primer on Perl for every system administrator
• In-depth coverage of basic and advanced Linux shell programming with bash and tcsh
• Practical explanations of 100 core utilities, from aspell to xargs–including Mac OS X specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• All-new coverage of automating remote backups with rsync
• Dozens of system security tips, including step-by-step walkthroughs of implementing secure communications using ssh and scp
• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line
• Complete guides to high-productivity editing with both vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 286-page command reference section–now with revised and expanded indexes for faster access to the information you need
• Instructions for updating systems automatically with apt-get and yum
• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence
• And much more, including coverage of BitTorrent, gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Welcome to Linux and Mac OS X

Part 1. The Linux and Mac OS X Operating Systems
Chapter 2. Getting Started
Chapter 3. The Utilities
Chapter 4. The Filesystem
Chapter 5. The Shell

Part 2. The Editors
Chapter 6. The vim Editor
Chapter 7. The emacs Editor

Part 3. The Shells
Chapter 8. The Bourne Again Shell
Chapter 9. The TC Shell

Part 4. Programming Tools
Chapter 10. Programming the Bourne Again Shell
Chapter 11. The Perl Scripting Language
Chapter 12. The AWK Pattern Processing Language
Chapter 13. The sed Editor
Chapter 14. The rsync Secure Copy Utility

Part 5. Command Reference
Command Reference

Part 6. Appendixes
A. Regular Expressions
B. Help
C. Keeping the System Up-to-Date
D. Mac OS X Notes