To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master the shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Worse, most Linux references offer little more than prettied-up man pages. Now, there’s a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book.

This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it on any Linux system, now and for years to come. What’s more, it’s packed with hundreds of high-quality examples: better examples than you’ll find in any other Linux guidebook. This is Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. And when you need instant answers, you’ll constantly turn to Sobell’s comprehensive command reference section—organized and tabbed for easy, fast access!

Don’t settle for yesterday’s Linux guidebook. Get the one book that meets today’s challenges—and tomorrow’s!

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming is the most useful, most comprehensive Linux tutorial and reference you can find. It’s the only book to deliver

* Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you’ll actually need to perform
* Deeper insight, based on Sobell’s immense knowledge of every Linux nook and cranny
* More practical explanations of more than eighty core utilities, from aspell to xargs
* Techniques for implementing secure communications using ssh and scp—plus dozens of tips for making your system more secure
* A superior introduction to the Linux programming environment, including make, gcc, gdb, CVS, and much more
* Expert guidance on basic and advanced shell programming using bash and tcsh
* Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line
* Thorough guides to vim and emacs, designed to help you get productive fast and maximize your editing efficiency
* Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence
* Instructions for using Apt, yum, and BitTorrent for keeping your system up to date automatically
* And much more, including coverage of gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions