Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By : Ahmed AlKabary
Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By: Ahmed AlKabary

Overview of this book

Linux is one of the most sought-after skills in the IT industry, with jobs involving Linux being increasingly in demand. Linux is by far the most popular operating system deployed in both public and private clouds; it is the processing power behind the majority of IoT and embedded devices. Do you use a mobile device that runs on Android? Even Android is a Linux distribution. This Linux book is a practical guide that lets you explore the power of the Linux command-line interface. Starting with the history of Linux, you'll quickly progress to the Linux filesystem hierarchy and learn a variety of basic Linux commands. You'll then understand how to make use of the extensive Linux documentation and help tools. The book shows you how to manage users and groups and takes you through the process of installing and managing software on Linux systems. As you advance, you'll discover how you can interact with Linux processes and troubleshoot network problems before learning the art of writing bash scripts and automating administrative tasks with Cron jobs. In addition to this, you'll get to create your own Linux commands and analyze various disk management techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the Linux skills required to become an efficient Linux system administrator and be able to manage and work productively on Linux systems.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Help for shell builtins

If you play around enough with man pages, you may notice that a lot of shell builtin commands do not have a man page. For instance, there is no man page for the cd or the exit commands:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ type cd 
cd is a shell builtin
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ man cd
No manual entry for cd
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ type exit
exit is a shell builtin
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ man exit
No manual entry for exit

That's because shell builtin commands do not have man pages, but do not freak out just yet! You can still find help on how to use shell builtins by using the help command. For example, to get help on how to use the exit command, you can run:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ help exit 
exit: exit [n]
Exit the shell.

Exits the shell with a status of N. If N is omitted, the exit status
is that of the last command executed.

Similarly, to get help on how to use the cd command, you can run the help cd command:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ help cd...