Well, most people who had to do with the UNIX commands exposed in this chapter will not agree with this title. ``What the heck! You have just shown me that the Linux interface is very standard, and now we have a bunch of commands, each one working in a completely different way. I will never remember all those options, and you are saying that they are funny?'' Yes, you have just seen an example of hackers' humor. Besides, look at it from the bright side: there is no MS-DOS equivalent of these commands. If you need them, you have to purchase them, and you never know how their interface will be. Here they are a useful - and inexpensive - add-on, so enjoy!
The set of commands dwelled on in this chapter covers find, which lets the user search in the directory tree for specified groups of files; tar, useful to create some archive to be shipped or just saved; dd, the low-level copier; and sort, which ...yes, sorts files. A last proviso: these commands are by no means standardized, and while a core of common options could be found on all *IX systems, the (GNU) version which is explained below, and which you can find in your Linux system, has usually many more capabilities. So if you plan to use other UNIX-like operating systems, please don't forget to check their man page in the target system to learn the maybe not-so-little differences.