Sams Teach Yourself UNIX® in 24 Hours Second Edition

Maximizing the Command Line

Now that you've learned some of the individual words of the UNIX command vocabulary, it's time to get into some of the fun and power of the UNIX system: combining individual commands into pipes or filters to perform complex and sophisticated tasks.

Task 8.1: The Secrets of File Redirection

So far, all the commands you've learned while teaching yourself UNIX have required you to enter information at the command line, and all have produced output on the screen. But, as Gershwin wrote in Porgy and Bess, “it ain't necessarily so.” In fact, one of the most powerful features of UNIX is the capability for the input to come ...