Guide to Unix/Explanations

This part of the guide contains a list of various topics which introduce and explain the use and administration of Unix-like systems.

There is an attempt to organise the subpages into parts.

Part 1: Command Line

• Shell Prompt introducing the shell, commands, and arguments
• Quoting and Filename Expansion
• Pipes and Job Control
• Signals
• Choice of Shell
• Environment environment variables and process limits
• Connecting to Remote Unix accessing remote shells and files

Part 2: Common Programs

• Scheduling Jobs at, cron
• Introduction to Editors available text editors
• Text Utilities cut, sort, sed, ...
• awk
• bc utility for arbitrary-precision arithmetic
• ed and sed text editors in command mode
• roff text formatting, often for manual pages

Part 3: Administration

• Becoming Root su and sudo for running commands as the root user
• Installing Packages binary packages from your OS-vendor

Part 4: Hardware

• Determining Hardware what hardware is my system using?
• Filesystems and Swap mounting disks, formatting and mounting disk images
• Partitioning Disks creating and editting partition maps
• Compact Discs playing audio, ripping with cdparanoia, burning with cdrecord

Part 5: Networking

• Interprocess Communication pipes, sockets, packets, local versus network
• Real Networking Interfaces Ethernet, PPP, wireless
• Fake Networking Interfaces loopback, bridges, encapsulation
• This list needs more topics.

Part 6: Electronic Mail

• Mail Server Overview Incoming Mail, Outgoing Mail, Local Mail, Client Connectivity
• Mail Server Related Terminology

Part 7: Security

• Firewalls How firewalls work and how to configure them

Part 8: Beyond This Book

• Finding Additional Help search engines and user groups