Over the past five years, this column has covered a lot of not-so-obvious features of Linux — mostly techniques that you’d use from the shell or another non-graphical environment. The start of your columnist’s sixth year seemed like a good time to try something a little different: a series of columns on features of Linux and shells that many books about Linux basically ignore, but that wizards should know. Studying these obscure features isn’t just for trivia buffs. Understanding how each feature works can help you grok “the big picture” of some pieces that make your favorite operating system the power platform that it is.
This month, let’s start with a quick overview of Linux and shell concepts that you should know, then dig into some shell features that might be new to you.
Linux Overview in Ten Paragraphs
Let’s review some of the fundamentals to start from the same place. (Please note: this isn’t an exact, complete description. Some details are simplified or omitted.)
A Linux system manages a set of processes, letting them share system resources (the processors, disks, networks, and so on). Basically, a process is a running program, a program waiting to run, or a suspended program. A process has a name (often the name of the program file that it’s executing) and a list of arguments (for instance, some filenames). Each process has a unique process ID, or PID, that’s assigned when the process starts. The ps utility lists processes.
A process runs under…
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