Preface

6

Acknowledgments

• Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan and others for writing the Unix operating

system.

• Linus Torvalds and all the kernel developers for writing the Linux kernel.

• Stephen Bourne for his Bourne shell, Brian Fox for the Bourne-again shell, and many other

people contributing to these amazing tools.

• Richard Stallman and all the people working on the GNU project for porting the Unix utilities.

• Machtelt Garrels for her amazing Bash Guide for Beginners. It saved my day many times.

• Łukasz Dziedzic, who developed the free “Lato” font (Latofonts⁶), used for the cover.

The cover photograph is by pxhere⁷. A detail of the photo has been extracted and edited. As a

commuter in London, I spend hours in stations and on public transport, and even these places can

reveal a secret beauty. This book was mostly written in the morning on busses of the line 26, if there

are more typos than words now you know the reason.

Sources

The sources of the knowledge I tried to distil in this book are countless. Many people and the

books they wrote, forums, Stack Overflow answers, a lot of experiments, a couple of hard disk

partitions zapped trying to understand how the filesystem works, and a decent number of years

spent automating processes. While all these are too many to be properly mentioned I can definitely

provide the source of the log file used in the examples and the exercises. It is a simplified version of

an Apache log file that can be downloaded here⁸

⁶http://www.latofonts.com

⁷https://pxhere.com/en/photo/175470

⁸https://github.com/elastic/examples/blob/master/Common%20Data%20Formats/apache_logs/apache_logs