Hi,

I am new to Linux. I installed it a few months ago but hardly use it.

I intend to learn UNIX commands from a book. I would like to know whether I could use UNIX commands in Red Hat Linux for practice purposes.


Thanks.

You shouldn't have any problems learning commands from a Redhat machine, though some might differ or there might be some not available, but learning Linux will give you a better grasp of actual Unix.

Yes and no.

There are many differences even between unix distributions.

There will be nothing as good as learning on the system you want to learn about but it will at least get you going with things like:
vi
top
sar
ps
kill
mount

etc etc.

Sorry to butt in... but what is "sar" ?

Hmm, nice Signature.. LOL.. I wonder which one would do more damage, that or :
"cat /dev/urandom >> /dev/hda"

System Activity Reporter.

It is used for monitoring CPU usage. Type:
sar 5 5

at a bash prompt. This will display the cpu usage 5 times - once every 5 seconds.

About 2 years ago I installed Red Hat 7.3 just before I signed up for a 2 credit Unix course at a University. As I was doing my homework at home I would try out the "Unix" commands on my Linux box. Then I would later try using the commands on one of the Unix computers at the University. Nearly every command we learned about worked the same under both Unix and Linux.

I suspect that many details of configuring the systems might be different however we did not cover much of that in the course. The activities that we did which were more or less identical included:

1) Accessing one Unix computer from other using commands such as SSH, telnet, rlogin. Then running programs remotely from the other computer.
2) Writing programs in C or C++ using the g++ compiler and/or the ddd debuger.
3) Using text editiors such as vi, vim or emacs
4) Setting permissions on files and folders using chmod
5) Transfering files between ftp servers with the ftp command
6) Using common ordinary commands such as ls, cat, mkdir, rmdir, cp, finger, whoami, find, grep, fgrep, egrep who, awk, mount and tar
7) Copying and pasting text using the middle mouse button.

So learning to use Linux is a way to learn about Unix! You can also learn about Unix by installing the free Cygwin Unix emulator to be run under Windows.