4.4BSD is the final release of what may be one of the most significant research projects in the history of computing. When Bell Labs originally released UNIX source code to the R&D community, brilliant researchers wrote their own software and added it to UNIX in a spree of creative anarchy that hasn't been equalled since. The Berkeley Software Distribution became the repository of much of that work.

This volume includes man pages for system administration commands (section eight of the online reference manual), plus supplementary documents useful to system administrators.

These include installation instructions for the 4.4BSD release (which are also included with the 4.4BSD-Lite CD-ROM Companion), plus papers on many system administration utilities and tasks. Some of these papers have been superceded by in-depth books, but many of them remain the definitive work on the topic, and all are of interest to serious UNIX administrators.

"Sometimes, when I'm stuck with a problem, I still go back to the original UNIX papers. They are terse, but often incredibly precise. Sometimes, a careful re-reading reveals some nuance that makes all the difference." --Tim O'Reilly