Perfect for the technically oriented UNIX® user who doesn't have time to wade through the manuals, as well as for the serious Internet user who needs to understand more about UNIX, this handbook offers concise, practical information on exactly what you need to know. Thoroughly updated with information on the latest UNIX developments, this Second Edition is now based on the POSIX.2 Standard. As before, topics include user utilities, standard editors, Emacs, Internet access tools, and the X Window Systemtrade; . New topics include the KornShell, the World Wide Web, newsreaders, and system administration from the user's perspective. Background on popular new systems, such as Linux and FreeBSD, has also been added. The book is organized functionally so that you can easily find the right tool for any task, and includes a complete alphabetical summary for fast lookup by command or option.

Paul W. Abrahams, Sc.D., CCP, is the author of TeX for the Impatient, a book whose success inspired UNIX for the Impatient. A consulting computer scientist and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery, he specializes in programming languages, design and implementation of software systems, and technical writing. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 and his doctorate in mathematics there in 1963, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy and writing his dissertation on "Machine Verification of Mathematical Proof". He is one of the designers of the first LISP system and also the designer of the CIMS PL/I system, which he developed while a professor at New York University. He also participated in the design of the Software Engineering Design Language (SEDL), developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Laboratories. Currently he is working on the design of SPLASH, a Systems Programming LAnguage for Software Hackers and on a new book, OS/2 for the Impatient. In 1995 he was honored as a Fellow of the ACM. Paul resides in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he writes, hacks, hikes, hunts wild mushrooms, and listens to classical music. His Internet address is abrahams@acm.org.

Bruce R. Larson is the founder of Integral Resources, a systems integration and UNIX consulting firm, a co-founder of BRInet (1995), which provides Internet connection and consulting services, and a partner in Internet Exchange Limited (1994), which provides dialup and ISDN connectivity in the Boston area. His specialties are shell tools, systems programming, IP and X.25 networks, performance monitoring, software integration, mail systems, and security. He has worked with Solaris, AIX, HPUX, IRIX, SCO UNIX, and other Intel-based UNIX systems. His experience includes configuring and administering Internet domains and connecting UNIX systems to X.25 networks, as well as designing and implementing custom installation scripts, kernel-level data extraction tools, shell tools, a software message switch, and IP-based utilities. From 1979 to 1981, he did software modeling for the Federal Aviation Authority under a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation; in 1988 he received his bachelor's degree in pure mathematics from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. A member of UniForum, the IEEE Computer Society, and the American Mathematical Society, Bruce resides in Milton, Massachusetts. His Internet address is blarson@ires.com

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PREFACEUNIX for the Impatient is a UNIX handbook--a detailed, comprehensive guide to the UNIX system that can serve both as a ready reference and as a means of learning UNIX. We've consciously aimed the book at readers who are comfortable with technical material, presenting the subject as concisely as possible rather than in gentle but lengthy tutorial steps and covering in a section what other authors cover in a volume. We achieve that not by omitting details but by omitting long explanations and numerous examples that illustrate a single point. Though the tutorial approach may be less demanding, ours is faster; thus the title of our book. The UNIX Operating SystemUNIX has become the standard operating system for computers in scientific, engineering, and research environments. Designed to be used interactively, UNIX is not bound by inherent memory constraints, handles multiple processes and users easily and naturally, and is well suited as a platform for networking and graphical environments. As the only major operating system not irrevocably tied to a specific hardware architecture, UNIX is particularly well adapted to use in networks of heterogeneous computers. Most UNIX systems now support the graphical user interface provided by the X Window System and most UNIX users use that interface. The result is that UNIX is now as easy and comfortable to use as any of the other graphics-based systems such as Microsoft Windows that are available on workstations and personal computers.Commercially supported versions of UNIX have long been available for most computers, but their price has usually been prohibitive for individual users. High-quality free systems that run on personal computers are now widely available as well. The advent of those free systems, Linux in particular, has enormously broadened the population of UNIX users.The POSIX.1 standard for UNIX-like system calls has been widely accepted for several years and has enabled programmers to write portable UNIX programs. The newer POSIX.2 standard for user commands, the standard on which this book is based, has meant that UNIX systems from different sources and on different computers have become more consistent with one another. Additional POSIX standards under development promise to make it even easier to move among UNIX systems.But UNIX is not an easy system to learn. In the early days of UNIX when it was still a research project, one person could master all its details and even a casual user could master most of them. That is true no longer. Today's UNIX user faces great obstacles: the profusion of commands and their options, variables, and subcommands; the differences among implementations; the rapid pace of change; the proliferation of related subsystems such as the Network File System and the X Window System; the sheer volume of material to be assimilated; the historical accretions; and the assumption all too prevalent in UNIX documentation that the reader is already familiar with what is being described.Technically sophisticated people often prefer to learn new programs and computer systems by reading the reference manuals, but it's hard to learn UNIX that way. The traditional UNIX reference manual consists of an alphabetical list of command descriptions called "manual pages". Many manual pages are cryptic, misleading, poorly organized, or erroneous in subtle ways. UNIX-specific terminology is often used without being defined; terminology is often used inconsistently from one command to another. The customary alphabetical list of options makes it difficult to see how the options relate to one another. Few manuals provide an overview or explanation of the basic UNIX concepts, and those that do often rely on early technical papers that are now about two decades old and cannot reflect what has happened since they were written. Overview of the BookThe central purpose of