Built-in Utilities

Built-in utilities are programs that allow you to perform tasks which involve complex actions in one fell swoop. For example, the "ls" utility which we will discuss tomorrow allows you to find out the contents of a directory and print that list to the monitor.

Utilities provide user-interface functions that are basic to the modern concept of an operating system but which are too complex to be built into the shell (remember that small and focussed is better in the UNIX philosophy).

There are usually over 300 such utilities built in to the UNIX systems shipped today and we will discuss many of them in this tutorial.

Of course, you can also install larger utilities such as commercial software packages, but those are usually considered separate from the UNIX OS whereas the built-in utilities tend to get clumped into the OS since they they are built in and the difference between them, the shell, and the kernel is transparent to the user.

So the next question must be how do you use these utilities? Well to answer that we return to the shell.

UNIX Shells
Introduction to UNIX for Web Developers | Table of Contents
Executing Utilities