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

Chapter 3. Command Line Utilities

IN THIS CHAPTER

Special Characters 42

Basic Utilities 43

less Is more: Displaying a Text File One Screen at a Time 45

Working with Files 45

lpr: Prints a File 47

| (Pipe): Communicates Between Processes 52

Compressing and Archiving Files 56

Obtaining User and System Information 63

When Linus Torvalds introduced Linux and for a long time thereafter, Linux did not have a graphical user interface: It ran on character-based terminals only. All the tools ran from a command line. Today the Linux GUI is important, but many people—especially system administrators—run many command line programs. Command line utilities are often faster, more powerful, or more complete than their GUI counterparts. Sometimes there is no GUI counterpart ...