In the chapter Chapter 1, Basic UNIX System Concepts, you were shown
how to launch a shell
. In this chapter, we will show you how to
work with it.
The shell
's main asset is the number of existing
utilities: there are thousands of them, and each utility is devoted to a
particular task. We will only look at a (very) small number of these utilities here.
One of UNIX®'s greatest assets is the ability to combine these
utilities, as we shall see later.