UNIX Web Tools
These get used on a couple of different systems: a PC laptop running
Linux, and the Well, which is a Sun machine.
- The joe editor. Most UNIX people fight over whether vi
or EMACS is the better editor. We skip all that. We use vi
when it can't be avoided. joe has a simple user interface, lots of
help, and all the commands we care about included.
- For Web browsing in a command line, we use lynx. It's fast,
skips all those boring images, and somehow makes even the worst laid-out
pages work OK without the graphics. It's also enormously useful for
development, with the lynx -source and lynx -dump options
for quickly grabbing a page, or even an entire website, and writing them to
standard output.
- When we need to move files between systems, we use the command-line
ftp client. It's pretty standard on all UNIX systems, and easy to
use, scriptable, and fast.
- One of the advantages of working in UNIX is that you have access to the
full range of UNIX commands, like wc for word and line counts,
sed, awk, grep and find for text
processing and searching, chmod for direct access to file
permissions and security, shell scripting, telnet for working on
remote systems, and even the mundane commands like ls for finding
information on files.
- For all kinds of programming problems we use Perl, a intepreted
scripting language that is probably the best tool around for getting things
done. It's fast, quick and dirty, and supports all the features of modern
languages should you require them, but another of its great advantages is
that you don't need to know much to start using it. It's easy to pick up on
the fly.
- If need be, we use C or Java for their specialised uses. Although not
strictly UNIX-only tools, they both have freely available compilers and
development tools - C has the GNU C Compiler, gcc, and Java has the
Sun Java Development Kit, with the java bytecode intepreter and the
javac compiler.
Back to the Web Tools page
http://www.transaction.net/web/surf/tools/unix/
zisk@well.com