Linux Pocket Guide

Linux Pocket Guide

by Daniel J. Barrett
Released February 2004
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9780596006280

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Book description

O'Reilly's Pocket Guides have earned a reputation as inexpensive, comprehensive, and compact guides that have the stuff but not the fluff. Every page of Linux Pocket Guide lives up to this billing. It clearly explains how to get up to speed quickly on day-to-day Linux use. Once you're up and running, Linux Pocket Guide provides an easy-to-use reference that you can keep by your keyboard for those times when you want a fast, useful answer, not hours in the man pages.Linux Pocket Guide is organized the way you use Linux: by function, not just alphabetically. It's not the 'bible of Linux; it's a practical and concise guide to the options and commands you need most. It starts with general concepts like files and directories, the shell, and X windows, and then presents detailed overviews of the most essential commands, with clear examples. You'll learn each command's purpose, usage, options, location on disk, and even the RPM package that installed it.The Linux Pocket Guide is tailored to Fedora Linux--the latest spin-off of Red Hat Linux--but most of the information applies to any Linux system.Throw in a host of valuable power user tips and a friendly and accessible style, and you'll quickly find this practical, to-the-point book a small but mighty resource for Linux users.

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Table of contents

  1. 1. Linux Pocket Guide
    1. What’s in This Book?
      1. What’s Linux?
      2. What’s Fedora Linux?
      3. What’s a Command?
      4. Users and Superusers
      5. Reading This Book
        1. Input and output
        2. Standard heading
        3. Standard symbols
        4. Your friend, the echo command
    2. Getting Help
    3. Fedora: A First View
      1. The Role of the Shell
      2. How to Run a Shell
    4. Logins, Logouts, and Shutdowns
    5. The Filesystem
      1. Home Directories
      2. System Directories
        1. Directory path part 1: category
        2. Directory path part 2: scope
        3. Directory path part 3: application
      3. Operating System Directories
      4. File Protections
    6. The Shell
      1. The Shell Versus Programs
      2. Selected bash Features
        1. Wildcards
        2. Brace expansion
        3. Tilde expansion
        4. Shell variables
        5. Search path
        6. Aliases
        7. Input/output redirection
        8. Pipes
        9. Combining commands
        10. Quoting
        11. Escaping
        12. Command-line editing
        13. Command history
        14. Filename completion
      3. Job Control
      4. Killing a Command in Progress
      5. Terminating a Shell
      6. Tailoring Shell Behavior
    7. Installing Software
    8. tar.gz and tar.bz2 files
      1. tar.gz and tar.bz2 files
    9. Basic File Operations
    10. Directory Operations
    11. File Viewing
    12. File Creation and Editing
      1. Your Default Editor
    13. File Properties
    14. File Location
    15. File Text Manipulation
    16. More Powerful Manipulations
      1. More Powerful Manipulations
        1. awk
        2. sed
        3. m4
        4. perl, python
    17. File Compression and Packaging
    18. File Comparison
    19. Disks and Filesystems
    20. Partitioning and Formatting Disks
      1. Partitioning and Formatting Disks
    21. Backups and Remote Storage
    22. File Printing
    23. Spelling Operations
    24. Viewing Processes
    25. Controlling Processes
    26. Users and Their Environment
    27. Working with User Accounts
    28. Becoming the Superuser
    29. Working with Groups
    30. Basic Host Information
    31. Host Location
    32. Network Connections
    33. Email
    34. Web Browsing
    35. Usenet News
    36. Instant Messaging
    37. Screen Output
    38. Math and Calculations
    39. Dates and Times
    40. Scheduling Jobs
    41. Graphics and Screensavers
    42. Audio and Video
    43. Programming with Shell Scripts
      1. Whitespace and Linebreaks
      2. Variables
      3. Input and Output
      4. Booleans and Return Codes
        1. test and “[”
        2. true and false
      5. Conditionals
      6. Loops
      7. Break and Continue
      8. Creating and Running Shell Scripts
      9. Command-Line Arguments
      10. Exiting with a Return Code
      11. Beyond Shell Scripting
    44. Final Words
      1. Acknowledgments
  2. Index
  3. About the Author
  4. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: Linux Pocket Guide
  • Author(s): Daniel J. Barrett
  • Release date: February 2004
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9780596006280