A. Glossary of Abbreviations

The most important abbreviations and acronyms used in the main text are defined here.

API

Application Programming Interface. The set of procedure calls that communicates with a linkable procedure library or an operating-system kernel or the combination of both.

BSD

Berkeley System Distribution; also Berkeley Software Distribution; sources are ambiguous. The generic name of the Unix distributions issued by the Computer Science Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley between 1976 and 1994, and of the open-source Unixes genetically descended from them.

CLI

Command Line Interface. Considered archaic by some, but still very useful in the Unix world.

CPAN

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The central ...

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