Linux Pocket Guide, 3rd Edition

This book is the third edition of the Chinese translation of O'Reilly's well-known Linux pocket guide. Written by Daniel J. Barrett, a longtime system administrator, and translated by Han Bo, it was published by China Electric Power Press in 2018. Organized around the idea of "look it up when you need it," the book groups the most commonly used and most valuable Linux commands by usage scenario. Each command comes with a brief explanation and examples you can copy directly, so readers need not read the book from cover to cover; they can turn to the relevant chapter with a specific problem and find the answer. The content starts from the most basic concepts: what Linux is, what a distribution is, what a command is, what a shell prompt looks like, basic command-line input and output, the hierarchical structure of the file system, and shell features such as wildcards, redirection, and pipes. It then moves to file operations, covering creating and editing files, attributes and permissions, directory operations, locating files, text processing, compression and archiving, file comparison, and working with PDF and PostScript files, printing, and spell checking. Next come disks and file systems, backups and remote storage, viewing and controlling processes, job scheduling, logging in and out and shutting down, users and their environment variables, account and group management, and becoming the superuser. Further sections cover host information and network connections, web browsing, instant messaging, screen output and clipboard copy-paste, math and date/time, image and audio/video processing, and software installation. The book closes with shell scripting and concluding remarks. Based on reader feedback, the third edition adds commands for handling image and audio files, running and terminating programs, reading and modifying the system clipboard, and processing PDF files, along with practical command-line techniques such as process substitution and bash pipes. Concise in length, the book is well suited to being kept at hand for quick reference.