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Chapter 1: Introduction
This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Commands on Linux
Linux commands are not the same as standard Unix ones. They’re better! This is
because most of them are provided by the GNU project run by the Free Software
Foundation (FSF). GNU means “GNU’s Not Unix”—the first word of the phrase
is expanded with infinite recursion.
Benefiting from years of experience with standard Unix utilities and advances in
computer science, programmers on the GNU project have managed to create
versions of standard tools that have more features, run faster and more efficiently,
and lack the bugs and inconsistencies that persist in the original standard
versions.
While GNU provided the programming utilities and standard commands such as
grep, many of the system and network administration tools on Linux came from
the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). In addition, some people wrote tools
that specifically allow Linux to deal with special issues such as filesystems. This
book documents all the standard Unix commands that are commonly available on
most Linux distributions.
The third type of software most commonly run on Linux is the X Window
System, ported by the XFree86 and X.org projects to standard Intel chips. This
book does not discuss the X Window System; see the O’Reilly book Running
Linux for an introduction to X. ...