| The fourth edition of Unix in a Nutshell brings the book into the 21st century. The term "UNIX" is a registered trademark of The Open Group. It is used for branding systems as compliant with the various standards that collectively define the behavior of a modern Unix system. More informally though, many systems in use today are Unix work-alikes, even though their source code base was developed independently from the original Unix systems. Thus, the goal of this edition to present the broader state of Unix in today's world. In particular, it's important to cover both the commercial variants, and those where source code for the system and the utilities are freely available. To this end, we have chosen to cover these systems, which are representative of "Unix" today:
Solaris 10 Solaris is the most popular commercial system based on the original Unix System V code base.
GNU/Linux GNU/Linux systems have gained a huge foothold in the commercial marketplace. While currently used most heavily for back-end servers, GNU/Linux is also starting to gain ground in the desktop market.
Mac OS X Apple's rewrite of their operating system has a core based on Mach and various BSD technologies. The command set is derived from FreeBSD. Thus, besides having an exciting user interface, Mac OS X is representative of the BSD strain of free Unix-like systems.
The commands covered by the current POSIX standard form the core of our presentation. Each specific system has commands that are unique to it; these are covered too. Finally, many important and useful utilities are distributed as Free or Open Source software on the Internet. We have done our best to cover those as well, including presenting the Internet URL from which you can download the source code, in case your particular system doesn't include that utility in its distribution. This edition has the following new features: Covers Solaris 10, the latest version of the SVR4-based operating system from Sun Microsystems,[*] GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X. [*] The version used for this book was for Intel x86-based systems.
Chapter 2, Unix Commands, has been heavily reorganized and revised, in order to cover the three systems. Chapter 3, The Unix Shell: An Overview, has been reworked, now covering Bash,[*] ksh93, and tcsh. [*] Because the Free Software Foundation treats "Bash" and "Emacs" as proper nouns, we do too, here and throughout the book.
Chapter 4, The Bash and Korn Shells, now covers the popular Bash shell, along with the 1988 and 1993 versions of ksh. Coverage of the vanilla Bourne shell has been dropped. Chapter 5, tcsh: An Extended C Shell, now covers the widely-used tcsh shell instead of the original Berkeley csh. Chapter 6, Package Management, is new. It covers package management programs, which are used for program installation on popular GNU/Linux systems. It also describes similar facilities for Solaris and Mac OS X. Chapter 8, The Emacs Editor, now covers GNU Emacs Version 21. Chapter 9, The vi, ex, and vim Editors, now contains merged coverage of the vi and ex text editors. Important commands and features from the popular vim editor are also included. Chapter 10, The sed Editor, now includes coverage of GNU sed. The coverage of awk in Chapter 11, The awk Programming Language, has been updated as well, dropping separate coverage of the original, "old" awk. Chapter 12, Source Code Management: An Overview, which provides an introduction to source code management systems, has been added. Chapter 14, The Concurrent Versions System, on CVS, has been added. Chapter 15, The Subversion Version Control System, on the Subversion version control system, is brand new. Chapter 16, The GNU make Utility, has been revised to focus on GNU Make. Chapter 17, The GDB Debugger, on the GDB debugger, is brand new.
As time marches on, once-popular or necessary commands fall into disuse. Thus, with the exception of Chapter 18, which describes how to write a manual page, all the material on the venerable troff text formatting suite has been removed from the book. We have also removed the previous edition's material on SCCS and on obsolete commands. |
