On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Cloutman, David wrote:

> I would add to absolute must-know commands:

It might be more useful to look up 'unix command reference' (or 'solaris 
command reference' as appropriate) on your favorite internet search 
engine.


> which - This will tell you where the binary file that a command is
> executing lives. If you are administering a machine, this information
> can be vital.

`which` can lie.  It's not a shell builtin, and if it's written as a csh 
script (as on MacOSX), and you have a .cshrc that adjusts your path, but 
you don't typically use csh, it may not show you the correct path.


> tar -zxvf - The tar command with all the flags needed to decompress a
> tar.gz file.

If you have gnu tar.  For older version of Solaris (definately pre-9, I 
can't remember if it was an issue in 9, and I've never used 10), you have 
to use:

 	gunzip -c file | tar xvf -

And for the reverse:

 	tar -cvf - input_files | gzip -c > file

-Joe H.