BSD Hacks

Dru Lavigne dru9780596006792, 0-596-00679-9

In the world of Unix operating systems, the various BSDs come with a long heritage of high-quality software and well-designed solutions, making them a favorite OS of a wide range of users. Among budget-minded users who adopted BSD early on to developers of some of today’s largest Internet sites, the popularity of BSD systems continues to grow. If you use the BSD operating system, then you know that the secret of its success is not just in its price tag: practical, reliable, extraordinarily stable and flexible, BSD also offers plenty of fertile ground for creative, time-saving tweaks and tricks, and yes, even the chance to have some fun.
“Fun?” you ask. Perhaps “fun” wasn’t covered in the manual that taught you to install BSD and administer it effectively. But BSD Hacks, the latest in O’Reilly’s popular Hacks series, offers a unique set of practical tips, tricks, tools–and even fun–for administrators and power users of BSD systems.
BSD Hacks takes a creative approach to saving time and getting more done, with fewer resources. You’ll take advantage of the tools and concepts that make the world’s top Unix users more productive. Rather than spending hours with a dry technical document learning what switches go with a command, you’ll learn concrete, practical uses for that command.
The book begins with hacks to customize the user environment. You’ll learn how to be more productive in the command line, timesaving tips for setting user-defaults, how to automate long commands, and save long sessions for later review. Other hacks in the book are grouped in the following areas:
Customizing the User Environment
Dealing with Files and Filesystems
The Boot and Login Environments
Backing Up
Networking Hacks
Securing the System
Going Beyond the Basics
Keeping Up-to-Date
Grokking BSD
If you want more than your average BSD user–you want to explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on your own–BSD Hacks is a must-have. This book will turn regular users into power users and system administrators into super system administrators.