Welcome

Welcome to the Unix Toolbox. This page only provides some information related to the toolbox document. The latest version is always available here: http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml.

Related links:

The Unix Toolbox in pdf format.
The Unix Toolbox in a booklet file with a single signature for duplex printers.
The Unix Toolbox in a booklet file with two signatures for duplex printers.
The Unix Toolbox in plain text format.
The front page is a useless but cool virtual shell.

All comments, suggestions, or error reports are of course most welcome. Help me to make an even better toolbox - c@cb.vu Colin Barschel.

About

The Unix toolbox is a collection of commands and syntax covering many common tasks for advanced users. I used to copy/paste such a command or instructions into a file and save it in a folder named "UnixToolbox". After some years I ended up with many files spread on many workstations and servers. However the examples I needed right now was typically nowhere to find in the mess. So I decided to gather all those files and notes, clean up the info and create a single document.

The xhtml page is designed with a single layout and without any external dependency. That is the css, java-script, svg are all embedded. This layout makes it possible to save the file for offline use and is also easy to search with the navigator. Furthermore the css print properties will create a nice pdf and a printable booklet to keep at hand.

This approach with examples has of course its weakness as one can't include everything and some operating systems or different kernel version will not behave in the same way. I try to keep the document as "small" and compact as possible. Also calling this a "Unix" toolbox is not accurate as it covers mostly Linux and FreeBSD. However I will add more Solaris and OS X commands in the future. Take a look at the Rosetta Stone for Unix for a good complement.

Help me

The document already grew bigger than I'd thought and I still try to keep it as compact and practical as possible. Still any new suggestion is most welcome and most importantly report errors or commands that do not work as explained, this will make the toolbox even better.

Are you a css or html hacker? I could not figure out how to solve the following problems, maybe you can:

Make the menu fixed on IE. There has to be a way to keep the right menu where it is on Internet explorer, I don't know how.
The color scheme (white - black) activated with the links on the bottom right do not work on Safari and Konqueror. It's a simple javascript activated css. I could make it to work when the css is external, but I want to have a self contained page with embedded css. So it doesn't work for now...

Translations

The following translations are available. Many thanks to the translators!

Portuguese (work is in progress)	Thanks to Caio Tedim and Sérgio Souza.
Bulgarian - Български	Thanks to Vladimir Kolev for this translation.
Chinese	Thanks to Greco Shi for this translation.
Spanish - Español work is in progress (stalled?)	Thanks to David Martinez for this translation.
Polish (work is in progress)	Thanks to Hubert
French - Français	Je manque de temps pour l'instant, alors si quelqu'un est intéressé, c'est très volontiers...

It would be nice to follow those guidelines when translating the toolbox in your language, those are only suggestions:

Avoid new line breaks on text, that is try to keep all text in one line and only add a line break after a paragraph. This makes it easier to track changes between revisions as the diff file will look similar.
Try to keep the text length similar to the original and check that no lines end in the margin on the pdf version. The xhtml document can be converted into pdf with the "prince" program from www.princexml.com.
Modify the copyright notice (at the begin and the end of the document) to include both the original author (Colin Barschel) and your name. Like:
© Colin Barschel and John Smith. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons.

How to mirror the document

You can mirror, modify and include the toolbox into your own website. Make sure you mention the original author (Colin Barschel), provide a back link to the original document and keep the same Creative Commons license [by - sa]. Also keep in mind that new versions are released once in a while so you might want to keep the page unmodified to make it easier to replace or use the php code below.
The toolbox is written in xhtml which makes it easy to interact with the XML DOM (Document Object Model). The following php code demonstrates how to select only parts of the document. This approach can be used to embed the toolbox in a website while still using the original unmodified document. A big advantage is that the file can simply be replaced by the newer version when the next release comes out. Additionally this makes it possible to use your css code for the colors and layout.
This site http://sleepyhead.de/howto/ demonstrates the technique. The index page parses a local copy of the original document and only displays the requested node, moreover the css code is automatically taken from the main site. The php code for this page is shown below, or download it here.

<?php

$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$dom->substituteEntities = true;
$dom->load('unixtoolbox.xhtml');  // this is a local copy
$xp = new DomXPath($dom);
$xp->registerNamespace('xhtml','http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml');

// Print the revision number and author
$subject = $xp->query("//xhtml:meta[@name='subject']");
$copyright = $xp->query("//xhtml:meta[@name='copyright']");
echo $subject->item(0)->getAttribute("content") . "<br />\n";
echo $copyright->item(0)->getAttribute("content") . "<br />\n";

// Get all h1 header from the TOC
$headers = $xp->query("//xhtml:ol/xhtml:li/xhtml:a"); // res ist a nodeList

foreach ($headers as $header) { // replace # with ?href=
    $attr = $header->getAttribute("href");
    $link = str_replace("#","?href=",$attr);
    echo "<a href=\"" . $link . "\">" . $header->nodeValue . "</a><br />\n";
}

// Display the div content as simple XML node
$href = $_GET["href"];
if ($href) {
    $h1 = $xp->query("//xhtml:div[@id='$href']");
    $div = $h1->item(0)->ownerDocument->saveXML($h1->item(0));
    echo utf8_decode($div);
}

?>

You are free to use this code in any way you want without any restriction.

Last diff

If you want to follow the changes, here is the last diff. Full revisions (e.g. 11 -> 12) usually include new content like additional commands or full sections. Small revisions (e.g 11 > 11.1) only relates to small corrections without significant changes. Or see all diffs.