OS chapter 8

$ prompt

(Pronounced "dollar prompt") The linux command prompt displayed in the BASH shell or in a terminal window when you are logged on as an ordinary (nonroot) user

Launcher

A GUI object (a bar) on the left side of the ubuntu unity desktop that serves the same purpose as the OS X Dock and the pinned items features on the taskbar on the windows desktop.

Kickoff Application Launcher

A GUI object on the KDE GUI bundled with fedora that, when clicked, opens a menu (similar to the windows start menu) for launching programs.

live image

A bootable image of the OS that will run from disc or other bootable media without requiring that the OS be installed on the local compute.

shell command

A command entered through the CLI shell

path

A description that an OS uses to identify the location of a file or directory

absolute path

A directory path that begins with the top level in Linux, an absolute path begins with a forward slash (/) to indicate the root directory

command completion

A feature of Linux (and OS X Terminal UNIX) that completes what is entered at the command line with a command name of file or directory name.

switch users

A feature of most OS that allows the currently logged-on user to leave their apps and data open in memory, switching away so that another user can log in to a separate session

home directory

In Linux, a directory created for a user using the user's login name, and location under the /home directory. This is the one place in Linux where an ordinary user account has full control over files without logging in as the root account.

root account

In Linux, an all-powerful account that is used only when absolutely necessary to do advanced tasks. Ubuntu Linux comes with this account disabled in a way that no one can log in directly with the account but there is a way to use it temporarily whenever you need it for tasks such as creating or deleting users.

daemon

In Linux, software that runs in background until it is activated.

owner

In Linux, the user account that creates a file or directory. This term is also used in Windows

Apache HTTP server

Open source Web server software, originally written for UNIX, runs on Linux

command-line history

The Linux and UNIX (and OS X terminal) feature that saves command-line history in a file name bash_history

shell

The OS component that provides the character-mode user interface - processing commands and issuing error messages and other limited feedback.

world wide web WWW

The graphical internet consisting of a vast array of documents located on millions of specialized servers worldwide

X window

The program code used as the basis for many GUIs for linux of UNIX

X window system

The program code used as the basis for many GUIs for linux of UNIX

Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP

The protocol for transferring the files that make up the rich graphical web pages we view on the WWW. it includes the commands a web browser uses to request web pages from a web server to display on the screen of a local computer.

Ubuntu

A group of Linux distributions supported by a company named Canonical

Wildcard

A symbol that replaces any character or string of characters as a parameter in a CLI command

access mode number

A value assigned to a file permission in Linux. The user (owner), group and others each have a different access mode number calculated using the following values: read = 4, write = 2, and execute = 1

terminal window

A window in a Linux GUI that provides a command-line interface CLI for entering Linux shell commands.

BASH

An acronym for Bourne Again Shell; the Linux component (shell) that provides the character-mode user interface for entering and processing commands, issuing error messages, and other limited feedback

GNOME

An acronym for GNU network object model environment, a Linux GUI that uses the Linux X Windows system.

Web

An acronym for the term World Wide Web WWW

object code

An executable program, the result of compiling programming statements, that can be interpreted by a computer's CPU or OS and loaded into memory as a running program.

Linux

An open source OS based on UNIX that was developed by Linus Torvalds and others beginning in 1991

GNU

An organization created in 1984 to develop a free version of a UNIX-like OS. GNU, a recursive acronym for GNU's Not UNIX, has developed thousands of applications that run on UNIX and Linux platforms. Many are distributed with versions of Linux.

case-sensitive

In an OS, a feature that allows the OS to preserve the case used for the character in a file name when creating it, but does not require the correct case to open or manage the file.

case-aware

In an operating system, a feature that allows the OS to preserve the case used for the characters in a file name when creating it, but does not require the correct case when opening or managing the file.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Red Hat's commercially available version of Linux

open-source software

Software distributed with all its source code, allowing developers to customize it as necessary

source code

The uncompiled text program statement that can be viewed and edited with a text editor or special program software.

burn

To write a digital data just once to a disc. Traditionally this term refers to the writing of data to a disc (CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R) that can only be written to once in any given area of the disc. Once full, you cannot add data to the disc. It is "write-once" . The source files can be individual files or an ISO file.