Advanced UNIX Programming, Second Edition

1. Fundamental Concepts

1.1 A Whirlwind Tour of UNIX and Linux

This section takes you on a quick tour of the facilities provided by the UNIX and Linux kernels. I won’t deal with the user programs (commands) that normally come with UNIX, such as ls, vi, and grep. A discussion of these is well outside the scope of this book. And I won’t say much about the internals of the kernel (such as how the file system is implemented) either. (From now on, whenever I say UNIX, I mean Linux, too, unless I say otherwise.)

This tour is meant to be a refresher. I’ll use terms such as process before defining them, because I assume you already know roughly what they mean. If too much sounds new to you, you may want to become more familiar with UNIX before proceeding. ...