A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

The Most Useful Tutorial and Reference, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples for Every Popular Linux Distribution

“First Sobell taught people how to use Linux . . . now he teaches you the power of Linux. A must-have book for anyone who wants to take Linux to the next level.”

–Jon “maddog” Hall, Executive Director, Linux International

• Learn from hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples, and become a true command-line guru
• Covers MariaDB, DNF, and Python 3
• 300+ page reference section covers 102 utilities, including macOS commands

For use with all popular versions of Linux, including Ubuntu,™ Fedora,™ openSUSE,™ Red Hat,® Debian, Mageia, Mint, Arch, CentOS, and macOS

This title is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic. Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, it presents Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful information about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions.

Use a Mac? You'll find coverage of the macOS command line, including macOS-only tools and utilities that other Linux/UNIX titles ignore.

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Fourth Edition, is the only guide to deliver

• A MariaDB chapter to get you started with this ubiquitous relational database management system (RDBMS)
• A masterful introduction to Python for system administrators and power users
• In-depth coverage of the bash and tcsh shells, including a complete discussion of environment, inheritance, and process locality, plus coverage of basic and advanced shell programming
• Practical explanations of core utilities, from aspell to xargs, including printf and sshfs/curlftpfs, PLUS macOS–specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• Expert guidance on automating remote backups using rsync
• Dozens of system security tips, including step-by-step walkthroughs of implementing secure communications using ssh and scp
• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell, including step values, sequence expressions, the eval builtin, and implicit command-line continuation
• High-productivity editing techniques using vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 300-plus-page command reference section covering 102 utilities, including find, grep, sort, and tar
• Instructions for updating systems using apt-get and dnf
• And much more, including coverage of BitTorrent, gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions