Unix

Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations.

The present owner of the trademark UNIX® is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX®" (others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like"). Similarly, POSIX defines a standard set of system calls, utilities and standard library functions for Unix-like systems.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to large-scale adoption (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) of Unix by commercial startups, notably Sun Microsystems. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD derivatives are commonly encountered.

The Philosophy of Unix

Although there is quite a variety among Unix systems, one common theme is the so-called "small tools that do their job very well." That is, in a unix system has many programs, each of which does only a small task. The user is then able to combine these tools (via scripting or piping) to accomplish higher level goals. Although this may make some tasks more difficult than common graphical user interfaces, it allows the user to perfom complicated tasks that were not explicity allowed for by the interface's designer.

For instance, suppose the user wanted to create an archive of all files which reference his vacation created between April and May of 2006. Under unix, this could be accomplished as a combination of tar (the archiving application), find (a file search application) and grep (a file pattern matching application). In a single command:

tar czf vacation.tar.gz `find . -exec grep -il vacation {} \;`

In contrast, a user in a graphical user would need to use the search application to find such files, wait for the search to complete, and then use an archiving application to create the archive.

List of Unix Utilities

These are some standard Unix utilities:

Name	Function
cc	The C Compiler
ls	List files in a directory
cat	Display or concatenate files
cp	Copy files
rm	Remove files
mv	Move or rename files
find	Find files
tar	Operates on archive files
grep	Searches the contents of files
ps	Displays process status
make	Automates build processes
sh	The command line interpreter (shell). Also, variants such as zsh, csh, tcsh, ksh, bash, etc.
sed	A stream-oriented text editor, which can operate in batch mode
vi	A visual text editor

These are a few utilities among the hundreds of existing ones.

See Also

• POSIX