UNIX System Administration Handbook, Third Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

The administration of UNIX systems has always been a somewhat neglected subject. I think this happened for several reasons, all connected to various aspects of its unusual history.

First, the creation and early spread of the system took place among devotees, people who soon became knowledgeable of its nooks and crannies. These groups were often irritated by the formalities and procedures common in the big computer centers that were the chief computational resources during the 1970s, and they were ingenious in developing their own wizardly administrative recipes instead of relying on cookbooks.

Second, a typical UNIX system inhabits a computing niche unusual until recently. Most commonly, such systems are either ...