UNIX Power Tools

UNIX Power Tools, a Book Review

by David Greer

UNIX Power Tools is an excellent book for any UNIX user who has to write shell scripts. It was written by Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, and Mike Loukides, published by O'Reilly and Associates/Bantam.. This book is filled with examples, and is well-indexed and cross-referenced.

At over 1000 pages, the book may look intimidating. However, this book is really a collection of independent articles, each just one to two pages long, that talk about a specific topic or solve a specific problem. The book is not meant to be read in order. Instead, look up something when you need to, or just flip to a random page and learn something new about UNIX.

For example, I learned the following two tips just from browsing:

Use tail -f to look at a file that is growing.
Use set notify to have background processes immediately tell you when they have changed states, instead of waiting for the next prompt.

A CD-ROM is included with all the shell scripts presented in the text. The binary executables on the CD-ROM ran on our Series 705 workstation immediately with no recompilation required. Very handy.

David Greer.