GnomeCORE

Core Vocabulary

As you know, Linux often seems to have a vocabulary of its own. It can appear pretty cryptic at first glance, but if you take careful and thoughtful time with your system, you’ll start to understand the language.

Today, we’re going to look through some of the language of Linux. Bear in mind that these few terms don’t even begin to scratch the surface, but the terms included today should serve as light Friday fare for expanding your knowledge for core Linux functions. This will become another “infrequent series” in Penguin Shell. Today we’ll look at some useful and interesting commands in the a -c range.

I’ve relied pretty heavily on Foldoc for the ‘official’ definitions of these terms. Where available, terms are linked to the Foldoc definition and is followed by my own understanding of the word or phrase. While you may not immediately see the connection to your Linux system or its use, believe me - they’re all relevant.

access permissions: This is a set of permissions associated with every file and directory on your Linux system. These permissions define, on a user-by-user level, or at a group level, whether users will be able to read, write and/or execute a file.

append: To add data to the end of a file. This can be done directly, but is most often accomplished as part of an automated process, using the ‘>’ symbol.

authentication: The process of verifying the identity of a user on your system.

background process: A process that runs in Linux without interacting with the terminal.

bin: A binary file - usually executable in Linux.

BogoMips: A bogus measurement of the number of millions of instructions per second executed by the processor.

Bourne Shell: The command line interpreter that served as the model for Bash - the Bourne Again Shell. This interpreter process commands from the user.

chmod: The administrative command in Linux to [ch]ange the [mod]e of a file or directory, modifying the access permissions to allow or deny read, write and execute access to specific users or groups of users.

chown: The administrative command in Linux to [ch]ange the [own]er of a file or directory. File owners have full permissions on the file or directory.

client: A program or process that requests data from another machine and interprets the results. Your browser of choice is you web client, for example. It makes requests to the server and renders the results.

compiler: A program that converts a set of high-level program instructions, such as source code, to low-level program instructions, such as machine language. In other words, a compiler converts easily-read source code instructions to the series of 1s and 0s (binary code) that the computer understands.

concatenation: Joining two or more files into a single file.

console: A computer system’s main terminal.

cron: The Linux daemon that executes programs in the background on a regular schedule.

Stay tuned … we’ll pick this list back up in the very near future.