I am really really new to Unix. I'm lost with so many books around for different shell. I'm thinking of taking a course on Operating Systems but it contains a lot of Unix programming I think. For example, someone was talking about a "which" command. But I wasn't able to figure out what it does... Which book gives me ideas on such things? Please advice...

How could you go wrong with a book called something like "UNIX for Dummies"?

"which" looks for a program on the $PATH and prints what it found.

try the following...

Thanks

Also thanks for the which explanation. So if I want to implement a hypothetical uwhich command that immitates the original which command, would that come under shell programming?

And finally, are there any unix simulators where i can do all this stuff or do you recommend me to install unix altogether?

or pascal, or C or C++ or Java or Perl or whatever language you chose to write your "uwhich" program in.

Why simulate when you can have the real deal?

What are you intending to simulate on? And what is your definition of UNIX?

If I am to guess that you are using Microsoft Windows, then you could do worse than try Cygwin or even Microsoft's very own "Services For UNIX".

I have also had great success running UNIX Version 7 on a PDP-11 emulator running on a Linux machine if that is what you mean.

I meant in C under Unix itself...

I was talking about simulators because generally they are easy to begin with. No hassles of installation. ANd my definition? Yeah, I know its an OS :P

My system runs Windows XP on a single drive. What is the best way to run Unix now? Paritition the disk or there's some other way?

That would count as C programming.

Do you not have to install a simulator?

Microsoft's Services for UNIX runs as a personality module under XP.

Cygwin runs as an application on XP.

Alternatively download and burn Ubuntu's LiveCD and boot from that.

Well, yeah, I need to install even a simulator but I guess application installation is much easier than OS installation atleast according to me.

Anyways, I'm stuck here without any CDs or DVDs. Is it possible to boot from a LiveCd without actually burning it? Now don't kill me for this question. I'm just curious...

If your machine can boot from a USB device, you can put some distros on a USB solid state memory disk.

Ok so if I use a LiveCD I would still be able to write shell scripts and do the basic stuff right?

As far as I'm aware. However where are you going to store them? (CD's are notoriously read-only). You could use a USB stick as a drive and put them on that, or else mount an NFS export from another machine.

Alright... I'll try that... Thank you so much. I've started reading the book you asked me to