A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux®: Fedora™ Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Third Edition

Chapter 5. The Linux Utilities

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IN THIS CHAPTER

Special Characters	126
Basic Utilities	127
less Is more: Display a Text File One Screen at a Time	128
Working with Files	129
lpr: Prints a File	131
| (Pipe): Communicates Between Processes	136
Compressing and Archiving Files	139
Obtaining User and System Information	146
Tutorial: Creating and Editing a File with vim	152

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When Linus Torvalds introduced Linux and for a long time thereafter, Linux did not have a graphical user interface (GUI): 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 ...