Linux in a Nutshell, Fifth Edition

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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.

systems. Package managers are useful for installing and updating software; they

make sure you have all the files you need in the proper versions.

All commands are interpreted by the shell. The shell is simply a program that

accepts commands from the user and executes them. Different shells sometimes

use slightly different syntax to mean the same thing. Under Linux, the standard

shell is bash. Others, such as the ksh Korn shell, the tcsh enhanced C shell, and

zsh, are available. Chapter 6 provides thorough coverage of bash and the Korn

shell; you may decide to read this chapter after you’ve used Linux for a while,

because it mostly covers powerful, advanced features that you’ll want when you’re

a steady user. Chapter 7 covers pattern matching, which is used by the Linux text-

editing utilities for searching based on a pattern rather than an explicit string.

To get any real work done, you’ll have to learn some big, comprehensive utilities,

notably an editor and some scripting tools. Two major editors are used on Linux:

vi and Emacs. Emacs is covered in Chapter 8, and vi is discussed in Chapter 9.

Chapter 9 also describes vim, an extended version of vi, commonly found on Linux

systems. Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 cover two classic Unix tools for manipulating

text ...