A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

For use with all versions of Linux, including Ubuntu,™ Fedora,™ openSUSE,™ Red Hat,® Debian, Mandriva, Mint, and now OS X, too!

The Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples for Every Distribution–Now Covers OS X and Perl, Too!

To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Now, there's a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book.

This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it with any Linux system, now and for years to come. Use Macs, too? This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of the Mac OS X command line, including essential OS X-only tools and utilities other Linux/UNIX books ignore.

Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, this book gives you Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. Sobell has also added an outstanding new primer on Perl, the most important programming tool for Linux admins seeking to automate complex, time-consuming tasks.

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Second Edition, is the only book to deliver

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you'll actually need to perform
• Deeper insight, based on Sobell's immense knowledge of every Linux and OS X nook and cranny
• A start-to-finish primer on Perl for every system administrator
• In-depth coverage of basic and advanced Linux shell programming with bash and tcsh
• Practical explanations of 100 core utilities, from aspell to xargs–including Mac OS X specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• All-new coverage of automating remote backups with rsync
• Dozens of system security tips, including step-by-step walkthroughs of implementing secure communications using ssh and scp
• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line
• Complete guides to high-productivity editing with both vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 286-page command reference section–now with revised and expanded indexes for faster access to the information you need
• Instructions for updating systems automatically with apt-get and yum
• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence

Mark G. Sobell is President of Sobell Associates Inc., a consulting firm that special­izes in UNIX/Linux training, support, and custom software development. He has more than twenty-five years of experience working with UNIX and Linux systems and is the author of many best-selling books, including A Practical Guide to Fedora™ and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Fourth Edition; A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux®, Second Edition; and A Practical Guide to UNIX®for Mac OS® X Users (coauthored with Peter Seebach), all from Prentice Hall; and A Practical Guide to the UNIX System from Addison-Wesley.