12. Basic Commands

You do most things in bash by issuing commands. Most of these commands are small programs. I won't say too much about these. I have just listed the packages that I found I needed. I fear that I may have lost track slightly of what was really necessary and what wasn't. I will fix this when I rebuild my system to test this document. There isn't too much baggage in the list. Most of it is needed for a fully functional Linux system anyway.

Ideally, this list should include all commands specified in The Unix File Heirarchy Standard and everthing needed to run the basic initscripts that come with the sysvinit dist.

• GNU fileutils fileutils commands such as cp, dd, ls, ln, mkdir and so on.
• GNU findutils findutils find and locate commands. Find is needed in an init script ((check your notes on this)).
• textutils? was that needed?? it contains cat, which is nice to have so you can look a files. its GNU
• Gawk gawk GNU's implementation of the awk language. Awk is good for processing records in text files like the system log. It is needed in an init script ((check your notes on this)).
• grep grep It is needed in an init script ((check your notes on this)).
• sed?? was that needed?? it's a GNU package
• sh-utils contains hostname, stty, true, false, yes, who, sleep
• Net Tools: is probably not completely necessary, since hostname is in sh-utils net-tools. The only thing you *really* need from this package, to get a really basic system up is hostname. But the other stuff in here such as, ifconfig, netstat and route will be needed when you want to connect your system to anything else.
• Process Monitoring procps. The main commands in here are ps and top. They enable you to see what is running on your system. This is useful for a learning exercise.