Shell Programming in Unix, Linux and OS X, Fourth Edition

Introduction

It’s no secret that the family of Unix and Unix-like operating systems has emerged over the last few decades as the most pervasive, most widely used group of operating systems in computing today. For programmers who have been using Unix for many years, this came as no surprise: The Unix system provides an elegant and efficient environment for program development. That’s exactly what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson sought to create when they developed Unix at Bell Laboratories way back in the late 1960s.

Note

Throughout this book we’ll use the term Unix to refer generically to the broad family of Unix-based operating systems, including true Unix operating systems such as Solaris as well as Unix-like operating systems such as Linux ...