Datasheet
❑ GUI is broken or not installed — If no graphical interface is available, or if the
installed GUI isn’t working properly, you may be forced to work from the com-
mand line. Broken GUIs can happen for lots of reasons, such as when you use a
third-party, binary-only driver from NVIDIA or ATI and a kernel upgrade makes
the driver incompatible. Also, many BSD servers don’t even have GUIs installed.
The bottom line is that to unlock the full power of your BSD system, you must be able
to use shell commands. Thousands of commands are available for BSD to monitor and
manage every aspect of your BSD system.
But whether you are a BSD guru or novice, one challenge looms large. How do you
remember the most critical commands and options you need, when a command shell
might only show you this:
$
BSD UNIX Toolbox is not just another command reference or rehash of man pages.
Instead, this book presents commands in BSD systems by the way you use them. In
other words, instead of listing commands alphabetically, we group together commands
for working with file systems, connecting to networks, and managing processes in their
own sections, so you can access commands by what you want to do, not only by how
they’re named.
Likewise, we won’t just give you a listing of every option available for every command.
Instead, we’ll show you working examples of the most important and useful options to
use with each command. From there, we’ll tell you quick ways to find more options, if
you need them, from man pages, the info facility, and help options.
Finding Commands
All the commands described in this book may not be installed when you go to run them.
You might type a command and see a message similar to:
mycommand: command not found
This might happen for the following reasons:
❑ You mistyped the command name.
❑ The command is not in your PATH.
❑ You may need to be the root user for the command to be in your PATH.
❑ The command is not installed on your computer.
Table 1-2 shows some commands you can run to look for a command you want to use.
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Chapter 1: Starting with BSD Systems
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