About the Author

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He is also a happy husband, the father of four very cute children, and an amateur Talmudist (Babylonian and Jerusalem). Since late 1997, he and his family have been living in Israel.

Arnold has been working with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. His experience also includes multiple commercial Unix systems, from Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC. He has been working with GNU/Linux systems since 1996, and for this book was introduced to the joys of the Macintosh. (iTunes is now his current favorite "killer app.")

Arnold has also been a heavy awk user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of awk. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation.

In previous incarnations he has been a systems administrator and a teacher of Unix and networking Continuing Education classes. He has also had more than one poor experience with start-up software companies, which he prefers not to think about anymore. These days he writes high-end Command and Control related software for a leading Isreali software compnay. One day he hopes to put up his own web site at http://www.skeeve.com.O'Reilly has been keeping him busy; he is author and/or coauthor of these bestselling titles: Learning the vi Editor, Effective awk Programming, sed & awk, Classic Shell Scripting, and several pocket references.

Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects.

The animal on the cover of Unix in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition, is a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur. Its generic name, Tarsius, is derived from the animal's very long ankle bone, the tarsus. The tarsier is a native of the East Indies jungles from Sumatra to the Philippines and Sulawesi, where it lives in the trees, leaping from branch to branch with extreme agility and speed.

A small animal, the tarsier's body is only 6 inches long, followed by a 10-inch tufted tail. It is covered in soft brown or grey silky fur, has a round face, and huge eyes. Its arms and legs are long and slender, as are its digits, which are tipped with rounded, fleshy pads to improve the tarsier's grip on trees. Tarsiers are active only at night, hiding during the day in tangles of vines or in the tops of tall trees. They subsist mainly on insects, and though very curious animals, tend to be loners.

Colleen Gorman was the production editor and the copyeditor for Unix in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition. Genevieve d'Entremont and Mary Brady provided quality control. Ellen Troutman wrote the index.

Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Karen Montgomery produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font. The back cover illustration is by J.D. "Illiad" Frazer.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Michael Kalantarian.