Organization of This Book

This book is a reference to the most important commands and utilities available on Linux systems.

Chapter 1, explains Linux’s strengths and the key aspects of working with Linux, and lays out the scope of this book.

Chapter 2, introduces TCP/IP networking and the Linux commands used for system administration and network management.

Chapter 3, is the core of the book, a reference listing of hundreds of the most important shell commands available on Linux.

Chapter 4, covers the commands used to control booting on Linux, particularly LILO and GRUB.

Chapter 5, explains the apt series of commands that manage updating and installation on Debian, and the RPM system and yum used by Red Hat/Fedora, Novell/SUSE, and several other distributions of Linux.

Chapter 6, documents Bash, the default command-line interpreter on Linux.

Chapter 7, introduces regular expressions and explains how different tools interpret these powerful tools for searching and text processing.

Chapter 8, provides reference information on Emacs, a text editor and full-featured development environment.

Chapter 9, describes the classic vi editor that is the most popular text-manipulation tool on Linux.

Chapter 10, describes this “stream editor” that is useful for processing files in standardized ways.

Chapter 11, documents another valuable tool for processing text files, the GNU version of awk that is the default on Linux systems.

Chapter 12, provides the background for understanding Subversion and Git, which are valuable tools for tracking changes to files and projects, and are discussed in the following two chapters.

Chapter 13, provides a description of a popular source code management and version-control tool.

Chapter 14, describes a distributed version control system with many advanced features including the ability to access project history even when not connected to a central server.

Chapter 15, describes virtualization on Linux, which allows multiple virtual servers to run on a single physical server. Tools covered include Xen, KVM, the libvirt API, and the VMware command-line interface.

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