From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line

APPENDIX AUnix Programs

This appendix describes some of the hundreds of standard Unix programs available on a command line. These are also called Unix utilities.

We generally don't include commands that are built in (see the section "Where the Commands Are Located" in Chapter 1) to the shell. We also don't describe many programs. To see some of the others, use ls to list the directories /bin and /usr/bin. Also check out /opt and /usr/local/bin. (In Chapter 2 we developed an easier way to do this.)

To learn more about a program named (for example) xyz, type man xyz or info xyz.

Program	Description
awk	A programming language useful for processing text as either strings or numbers. See also sed (smaller and faster for text-only work) and ...