Unix
lastmod 2026-09-22created 2014-01-0720 edits
Unix is a general-purpose, multi-user, time-sharing operating system popular in educational and research institutions. It was first developed in the early 1970s by Bell Labs employees Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and others. Today's Unix systems come in many versions developed by companies including AT&T and by non-profit organizations such as the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).
From the start, Unix was designed to be portable across different systems and to support multitasking and multiple users. Unix systems have the following concepts.
- Plain text files, a command-line interpreter, a hierarchical file system, treating devices and certain kinds of inter-process communication as files, etc.
- From a software engineering perspective, Unix is characterized by its use of C and the Unix philosophy.
- The UNIX trademark is held by The Open Group, and the copyright to the Unix source code is owned by Novell.
Through a program called SCOsource, the SCO Group provides licenses to all companies and individuals who want to use operating systems with code based on Unix System V Release 4 (and its own release, UNIX System V, Release 5).
Meanwhile, the dot-com crash brought a wave of mergers to Unix vendors as well. Of the many commercial Unix vendors born in the 1980s, only Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, NeXT's NEXTSTEP (which later became OPENSTEP and is now Mac OS X), and the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating systems are still sold on the market. Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, the Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella), and others were merged into other companies or went out of business. In addition, the growing use of Linux and open-source BSD eroded the existing commercial Unix market.
Categories
- InformationSecurity:CheckList:Unix - Security checklist for Unix-like systems.
Distribution Packages
Commands
| alias, apropos, apt-get, aptitude, aspell, at, awk, basename, bash, bc, bg, break, builtin, bzip2, cal, case, cat, cd, cfdisk, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chkconfig, cksum, clear, cmp, comm, command, continue, cp, cron, crontab, csplit, cut, date, dc, dd, ddrescue, declare, df, diff, diff3, dig, dir, dircolors, dirname, dirs, dmesg, du, echo, egrep, eject, enable, env, ethtool, eval, exec, exit, expect, expand, export, expr, false, fdformat, fdisk, fg, fgrep, file, find, fmt, fold, for, format, free, fsck, ftp, function, fuser, gawk, getopts, grep, groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, groups, gzip, hash, head, help, history, hostname, iconv, id, if, ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, import, install, iptables, jobs, join, kill, killall, less, let, ln, local, locate, logname, logout, look, lpc, lpr, lprint, lprintd, lprintq, lprm, ls, lsof, make, makefile, man, mkdir, mkfifo, mkisofs, mknod, more, mount, mtools, mtr, mv, mmv, netstat, nice, nl, nohup, notify-send, nslookup, od, open, op, passwd, paste, pathchk, ping, pkill, popd, pr, printcap, printenv, printf, ps, pushd, pwd, quota, quotacheck, quotactl, ram, rcp, read, readarray, readonly, reboot, rename, renice, remsync, return, rev, rlogin, rm, rmdir, rpm, rsh, rsync, screen, scp, sdiff, sed, select, seq, set, sftp, shift, shopt, shutdown, sleep, slocate, sort, source, split, ssh, strace, su, sudo, sum, suspend, symlink, sync, tail, tar, tee, test, time, times, touch, top, traceroute, trap, tr, true, tsort, tty, type, ulimit, umask, umount, unalias, uname, unexpand, uniq, units, unset, unshar, until, updatedb, uptime, useradd, userdel, usermod, users, uuencode, uudecode, v, vdir, vi (vim), vmstat, wait, watch, wc, whereis, which, while, who, whoami, wget, write, xargs, xd-open, yes, yum, zip, |