It is our repeated and avowed agreement not to write another Unix manual. By reviewing some of the Unix features we find useful and essential in our work, we hope we have assembled in this chapter an eclectic mini manual which does not waste your time by telling you more than you need to know. Feel free to skip through this chapter or just use it for reference if you feel you know it already; please feel compelled to study a real Unix manual if you do not know it at all.
Our convention is to write in bold type commands which you give Unix, to have the computer's response or file names in monospaced type, and to have key words or jargon (you may need to look up their meaning) in italics. Unfortunately the responses and error messages Unix produces often differ from implementation to implementation. In our examples we use generic BSD and System V commands and responses.
If you are working from a Unix machine you can use this text as a tutorial *.