The 101 Most Important UNIX and Linux Commands
Description
This book delivers what the title states: It describes the 101 most important UNIX and Linux commands and system calls. The book bridges the gap between on-line tutorials and manual pages on one hand, and books of 1,000 pages or more that explore the nuances of many shell commands in exhaustive detail. While most of these sources provide excellent information, they do not really solve the plight of the novice user, nor do they fully answer the questions that more experienced, and even expert, users often have. Much of the complexity of UNIX and Linux, and much of the difficulty faced by users is caused by the extremely large and rich set of shell commands, many of which have a very large set of allowable options that, while useful in certain circumstances, often provide more frustration than help because of their complexity. Many UNIX and Linux system calls are also complex, and have interactions that can be rather difficult for many programmers.
The many variants of UNIX cause additional difficulties. Even Linux has multiple variants: there are often subtle differences in the Linux implementations by Red Hat (Fedora), Ubuntu, SUSE, and Debian. For example, one of my recent senior students had a major project that required using a particular "Linux" software application containing a particular language's character set and grammar. The software would not work (indeed, it would not even install properly) on three of the most common Linux implementations!
Our approach is to focus on a smaller set of commands and system calls ? the ones that are most important. For each of these, only the most useful of the many options are described.
As a professor, I taught operating systems in general, and UNIX in particular, for over twenty-five years. As the author of the book Advanced Topics in UNIX, which was selected as a main selection on UNIX by the Newbridge Book Club, and Advanced Topics in UNIX, Second Edition (available electronically on this ebook platform), I had to make choices in what I presented and how I presented it. Finally, as an analyst/consultant on many different applications in multiple UNIX and Linux systems, I had to make choices based on the quality of the source code, and on its performance and maintainability.
I am confident that I have made the correct choices in selecting which of the many shell commands, system calls and options to discuss in this book and at what level they should be discussed. I hope you agree.
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Person
About the Author
I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair. (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.) While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States. We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university. I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department's hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users. We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems.
As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads. I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications. My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists. More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television.
I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas.
My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years. I was the editor or co-editor of that society's journal for many years.
