The Second Edition is based on the IEEE POSIX.2 Standard now widely adopted by UNIX vendors and implementors. Descriptions of commands and facilities have been extensively revised to conform to the POSIX specifications and extended to cover the entire set of POSIX.2 user utilities. As before, important System V, BSD, and GNU variations and enhancements are also presented.

Topics include user utilities, shells, the vi editor and other standard editors, the GNU Emacs editor, Internet access tools, the awk language, and the X Window System. New topics in the Second Edition include the Korn Shell, internationalization, the World Wide Web, newsreaders, and system administration from the user's perspective. The Emacs coverage has been updated to Emacs Version 19 and now covers the use of Emacs under X. Background material now includes popular new systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.

1. Introduction

1.1) UNIX Background

1.2) The POSIX.2 Standard

1.3) How to Use This Book

1.4) Typographical Conventions

1.5) Syntactic Conventions

1.6) Getting Started

2. Concepts

2.1) The UNIX Manual

2.2) System Administration and the Superuser

2.3) Users and Groups

2.4) What the Shell Does

2.5) The UNIX Kernel

2.6) Processes

2.7) The UNIX File System

2.8) File Permissions

2.9) Conventions for Using Files

2.10) Standard Files and Redirection

2.11) Other Facilities for Interprocess Communication

2.12) UNIX Commands

2.13) Local Variables

2.14) Initialization Files

2.15) Terminal Descriptions

2.16) Locales, Code Sets, and Internationalization

2.17) Regular Expressions

2.18) Devices

3. Operations on Files

3.1) Operations on Directories

3.2) Listing Files with ls

3.3) Displaying and Concatenating Files with cat

3.4) Linking, Moving, and Copying Files with ln, mv, and cp

3.5) Removing Files

3.6) Examining Files or Output with a Pager

3.7) Printing Files

3.8) Finding Files with find

3.9) Locating, Classifying, and Checking Files

3.10) Comparing Files

3.11) Controlling File Access and Ownership

3.12) Miscellaneous File Utilities

3.13) Data Compression and Encoding

3.14) Archiving Sets of Files

3.15) Examining Files with od

3.16) Copying and Converting Data with dd

3.17) Updating Files with patch

3.18) Creating Special Files

4. Data Manipulation Using Filters

4.1) Sorting Files with sort

4.2) Finding Patterns with grep

4.3) Simple Data Transformations

4.4) Extracting Parts of Files

4.5) Combining Files

4.6) Using sed to Edit from a Script

4.7) The awk Programming Language

4.8) Other Data Manipulation Languages

5. Utility Programs

5.1) Information Services

5.2) Reporting on the Status of Processes

5.3) Managing Processes

5.4) Commands Related to Logging In

5.5) Controlling Your Terminal

5.6) On-Line Communication with Other Users

5.7) Disk Usage Statistics

5.8) Writing and Reading Strings

5.9) Evaluating Expressions

5.10) Special Invocation of Commands

5.11) Querying Your UNIX Environment

5.12) Miscellaneous Services

5.13) Producing Locale Information and Defining a Locale

5.14) Document Processing

5.15) Version Control

6. The Korn and POSIX Shells

6.1) Overview of the KornShell

6.2) Interacting with the Shell

6.3) Editing an Input Line

6.4) Calling the Shell Directly

6.5) Shell Scripts

6.6) Syntax of Shell Input

6.7) Pattern

6.8) Simple Commands

6.9) Linking Commands with Operators

6.10) Redirection

6.11) Here-Documents

6.12) The test, true, and false Commands

6.13) Compound Commands

6.14) How Commands Are Executed

6.15) Parameters

6.16) Parameter Expansions

6.17) Quotation

6.18) Substitutions

6.19) Aliases

6.20) Commands for Job Control

6.21) The Command History and the fc Command

6.22) Intrinsic Commands and Predefined Aliases

6.23) Predefined Variables Used by the Shell

6.24) Execution Options

6.25) Initialization Files for the Shell

6.26) Parsing Command Lines with getopts

6.27) A Sample Shell Script

7. Other Shell