A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition

5. The Linux Utilities

IN THIS CHAPTER

Special Characters 160

Basic Utilities 161

less Is more: Display a Text File One Screen at a Time 162

Working with Files 163

lpr: Prints a File 165

| (Pipe): Communicates Between Processes 170

Compressing and Archiving Files 174

Obtaining User and System Information 180

Tutorial: Using vim to Create and Edit a File 186

When Linus Torvalds introduced Linux and for a long time thereafter, Linux did not have a graphical user interface (GUI): It ran on character-based terminals only, using a command-line interface (CLI), also referred to as a textual interface. All the tools ran from a command line. Today the Linux GUI is important but many people—especially system administrators—run many commandline utilities. ...