[Page 108 (continued)]4.1. Introduction In this chapter, I introduce about thirty useful utilities. Rather than describe them in alphabetical order, I've grouped them into fairly logical sets, as shown in Figure 4-1. Figure 4-1. Advanced Linux/GNU utilities.Section | Utilities |
|---|
Filtering files | egrep, fgrep, grep, uniq | Sorting files | sort | Comparing files | cmp, diff | Archiving files | tar, cpio | Searching for files | find | Scheduling commands | at, crontab | Programmable text processing | gawk, perl | Hard and soft links | ln | Switching users | su | Transforming files | gzip, gunzip, sed, tr, ul, zcat | Looking at raw file contents | od | Mounting file systems | mount, umount | Identifying shells | whoami | Timing execution of a command | time |
The remainder of this chapter goes through each group in turn, describing the utilities using worked examples. |