Open Source Web Development with LAMP: Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP

2.2. Basic Unix

This section should provide a basic overview of Unix for someone who doesn’t know anything about it. If you do, you can skip to the next chapter. If you don’t, this will only be a snippet of knowledge, and you need to get a real Unix book to put by your bedside, alongside the USAH (which covers this ground most excellently), HLE, and Unix Power Tools [Powers+ 02] (hereafter called UPT). The goal here is not to explain every nuance of Unix but to make the first-time user aware and knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions. We hope that sometimes simply a mention is enough to get you to ask the right questions.

First, Linux is primarily used through a command line interface. You open a terminal shell and enter text commands ...