UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I am newbie to unix. I am been immensily impressed by this forum. I have installed sun solaris in my pc and started learning unix. The question is, If i know one unix flavour (say sun solaris) is that i can claim, i know all the unix and linux flavours. Can i be able to work on other vendor unix without much transition?

Thanks

I've used various flavours of unix on a variety of platforms ranging from OpenBSD and Linux right through to Solaris. To be honest, the main differences IMHO are simply the paths to system files, how startup works etc. The main utilities and principles remain the same, but config files might be in different places.

Hope that helps!

You will probably also find that command line switches to many utilities are slightly different between vendors, especially between the SysV derivatives and the BSD derivatives. Things like ps, tar, grep etc often have slightly different syntax. Scan the man pages and you should not have too many problems...

Syntax does vary slightly so make sure you do a <B>man</B> on the command first when on a new platform (very important if you are the superuser). Also, don't forget that aliases in the shell that may be found in <B>/etc/profile</B> and other similar files/places may dramatically change command line behavior.

Many folks routinely create aliases for their favorite shell commands "cross-platform" so that commands will be uniform when they login across many different platforms or hop from one terminal to the next.

Also, make sure that you include the name of the platform in the login prompt shell variable so that you will easily remember what platform you are on when remotely logging in across many systems.