UNIX Utilities: A Programmer's Reference

Covers all major UNIX utilities.

This book is about UNIX utilities; it teaches you how to use the most popular of the numerous utilities that are available in the UNIX environment. This book does not teach you to get started with UNIX. It is for those who wish to program in the UNIX environment. It can also serve as a supplementary textbook for a course in UNIX.

There are numerous versions of UNIX available on the market today. While programming at the system level is increasingly becoming unportable across versions, the UNIX utilities which are discussed in this book hardly vary across versions. Furthermore, the utilities discussed are available on most UNIX versions. The primary purpose of this book is to simplify utilities that may look cryptic and advanced in the reference manuals. The material presented here can save a lot of programming efforts. If the reader reads just one chapter and uses it in the UNIX software development environment, the cost of this book will have been recovered several times over. The numerous examples given here are not intended to demonstrate any particular programming style.