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Welcome to the GNU/Linux-Solaris Comparative Command Line Documentation Project

Wouldn't it be cool to have a complete source for commands, their flags and some examples of their uses? This web site may end up being that for you.
What are your most used CLI Commands? You probably know a strong subset of the flags for your most-used commands in Linux (if you are primarily a Linux user), or in Solaris (if you are primarily a Solaris user). The idea of this project is to develop a manual of commands and the differences, where they exist, between Linux and Solaris.

There are lots of Linux distros. There are some differences between them, however the main difference between distros on a command line level is package-install system. There is the Red Hat-based RPM installer, the R-Path? Coronary installer and the Debian dpkg installer. Unless there is substantial disagreement, I would like to focus on debian-based systems, for the most part, as I am partial to Ubuntu.
In both GNU/Linux and Solaris, the version to focus on is current stable (and the Solaris Express Development version in cases where it is useful). There are a whole lot of similarities, but as a new user of Solaris, I can attest that there are enough differences to make starting a new Solaris implementation a run to the instruction manuals.

On Ubuntu, I use the following commands pretty regularly, and I launched this project because I was looking for a small manual that showed the commands in Solaris, which I have not found yet. Since the project could be so useful to *nix beginners, why not have a comparison of the commands with "man page" detail. The next step is to de-geekify the man page information and provide some examples that work. I am teaching OS-use in a college setting right now and so I cannot walk 10 yards without bumping into a student who wants clarification about some command and its options, so a departure from the *nix man-shorthand we all know and love would be extremely helpful for me, and maybe for other educators. I would like to be able to hand this URL out to a 1st-year IT student and have them be able to get a little more out of it than they do from man pages. Perhaps you can remember a time when it was challenging to sort out which parts of the commands are which.

I know, for instance, that the application package manager for Solaris is called pkgadd, and that correlated to dpkg. Solaris zfs has some features that are not available in ext3. I have heard there is an ext4 file system out there, but I have not seen it yet (I read it was going to appear in Fedora9). Many of them are calls to applications and not core-utils, but they are the things I use.

wolf@prospero:~$ -Tab- -Tab- #lists all available man pages
Display all 3067 possibilities? (y or n)

OpenSolaris? has only 1645 possible choices. To get all of these listed and (slightly) de-geeked would be an excellent resource.


Code:

ls # for directory reading
cd # changing directories
mkdir # to make directories
rm # to remove files and empty directories
rm -R # to remove non-empty directories (this is one of the dangerous commands
touch # to make files and update the "last accessed" point
./ #to run executables (like 'configure')
echo # to write something to display
uname -a # to check on what kernel I am running, so I can tell the forum support my details (if something were to go wrong.
chmod # change permissions on files
vi # text editing (it is ugly, but it is available on all unmodified unices that I have ever seen)
/usr/bin/bash # to run scripts
locate # to find files anywhere in the whole filesystem
which # to see 'which' application is the default. You could have several copies of an application on the machine, but there is one that is used by default.
perl # to run perlscripts
grep # to search for files
cat # to search for contents of files
sudo # to act as root (or a sudoer)
ping # to check if an IP or domain name is live (or at least accepting ICMP Packets) I know it's old-fashioned, but ping is more useful that a browser message "page cannot be found."
reboot # to reboot the machine
startx # to open a GUI session from TTY1 Terminal-only mode.
sudo dpkg --configure -a # to fix broken packages.
dpkg -i # to install downloaded debian packages.
alien # to change rpm packages to debian ones so I can use dpkg -i to install them.
apt-get # to download application packages from a repo
aptitude # to download application packages from a repo, too. Aptitude does a better job than apt-get solving dependency problems, AND has an ncurses graphical control panel that is useful when you are in a CLI-only situation.
valgrind # to run debugging traces on unhappy applications.
ssh # to connect to non-local servers securely.

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Transparency Disclaimer: My plan with this project is to license the output as as creative commons license similar to http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/ or with some other license that is in line with the GPL, and the spirit of Open-Source?, so people who are interested can download it for free and Print-on-Demand? copies can be purchased at a nominal fee. If you are interested in being part of this documentation project, let me know. My email is
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