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

“First Sobell taught people how to use Linux . . . now he teaches you the power of Linux. A must-have book for anyone who wants to take Linux to the next level.”

–Jon “maddog” Hall, Executive Director, Linux International 

New Chapters on Python and MySQL–Covers Perl, too!

• Learn from hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples, and become a true Linux command-line guru!
• NEW! Covers busybox, Midnight Commander, screen, and sshfs/curlftpf
• Covers the Mac OS X command line and its unique tools
• 295-page reference covers 98 utilities, including Mac OS X commands! 

Linux is today’s dominant Internet server platform. System administrators and Web developers need deep Linux fluency, including expert knowledge of shells and the command line. This is the only guide with everything you need to achieve that level of Linux mastery. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools sysadmins, developers, and power users need most, and has created an outstanding day-to-day reference.

This title is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic. Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, it presents Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful information about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions.

Use a Mac? You’ll find coverage of the Mac OS X command line, including OS X-only tools and utilities other Linux/UNIX titles ignore. Sobell presents a new MySQL chapter. There’s even an expert introduction to Python–today’s most valuable tool for automating complex, time-consuming administration tasks.

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

• A MySQL chapter to get you started with this ubiquitous relational database management system (RDBMS)
• A masterful introduction to Python for system administrators and power users
• New coverage of the busybox single binary collection of utilities, the screen terminal session manager/multiplexer, and the mc (Midnight Commander) textual file manager, plus a new chapter on using ssh for secure communication
• In-depth coverage of the bash and tcsh shells, including a complete discussion of environment, inheritance, and process locality, plus coverage of basic and advanced shell programming
• Practical explanations of 98 core utilities, from aspell to xargs, including printf and sshfs/curlftpfs, PLUS Mac OS X-specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• Expert guidance on automating remote backups using 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, including step values, sequence expressions, the eval builtin, and implicit command-line continuation
• High-productivity editing techniques using vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 295-page command reference section covering 98 utilities, including find, grep, sort, and tar
• Instructions for updating systems using apt-get and yum
• And much more, including coverage of BitTorrent, gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions

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 thirty 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®, Sixth Edition, and A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux®, Third Edition, both from Prentice Hall.