How To Look Like A UNIX Guru

by Volker Weber

UNIX is an extremely popular platform for deploying server software partly because of its security and stability, but also because it has a rich set of command line and scripting tools. Programmers use these tools for manipulating the file system, processing log files, and generally automating as much as possible.

If you want to be a serious server developer, you will need to have a certain facility with a number of UNIX tools; about 15. You will start to see similarities among them, particularly regular expressions, and soon you will feel very comfortable. Combining the simple commands, you can build very powerful tools very quickly--much faster than you could build the equivalent functionality in C or Java, for example.

This applies to Mac OS X and Linux just as well.

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Comments

If your system doesn't have "fuser" (OS X doesn't), you can use "lsof". Most Unices nowadays have "pgrep" and "pkill" which make the ps|grep thing obsolete. The easiest way to impress your friends is to learn how to use bash's command history ...

Stefan Tilkov, 2005-07-11

"Unix ist zwar ein Mainframe-Betriebssystem (und damit obsolet) hat aber noch viele Anhänger."
(Windows MSCE-Training-Guide Windows 2000 Server) :-)

martin hipfinger, 2005-07-11

MCSE ? ;-)

Volker Weber, 2005-07-11

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