Question

You are the network administrator for Slimjim, a peripheral device company. The network uses Linux, and you need information on some commands to perform your job. Open the manual pages and find all the commands that have the word "copy" in their name or description. What command did you use to accomplish this task? Are there any commands in this list that only a root user can execute? How are they indicated? Select any two of them and compare their info and manual pages. Access and read the manual pages on three other commands that interest you either by using the command name or searching for them by related keyword (try using apropos).

Answer 1

Step 1 of 4

What command did you use to accomplish this task?

First of all, let us ask ourselves what manual pages or man pages are. Manual pages in Unix/Linux are sometimes referred to as an online form of software documentation. They are a set of pages that try to explain and expound every command available on your system. Further, these pages explain to you the specifics of what each command does and how to run them. And in this case, we can use two commands to search for all the commands that have the word "copy" in their name or description. The commands are “man –k copy” or “apropos copy”

Step 2 of 4

Are there any commands in this list that only a root user can execute? How are they indicated?

Yes. There are several commands in this list that only a root user can execute. If you would want to find out what these commands are, the best way to do that is to look at those manual pages that are indicated by the manual page section number. If it has a number 8, then a root user can execute this command

Let’s compare the cp command and the cpio command

If you do an apropos or a man page on the commands above, you will spot a few differences. The cp command is used to copy files and directories from source to target location while the cpio command copies files to and from archives. The available options are –a –b –d –f –i –l –L –p and several others. On the other hand, the available options for cpio are –0 –a –A –b –B –C –c –d –E and more.

Access and read the manual pages on three other commands that interest you either by using the command name or searching for them by related keyword (try using apropos)

affcopy command

NAME

      affcopy - reorder and recompress AFF files

SYNOPSIS

      affcopy [options] file1 file

      affcopy [options] file1 file2 file3 ... dir

      affcopy [options] file1 file2 file3 ... dir1 dir2...

OPTIONS

General options:

             -d     Print debugging information as well.

             -h     Help, print this message.

             -L     Recompress pages (preen) with LZMA (smaller but slower).

             -m     Just copy the missing segments.

bcopy command

NAME

      bcopy - copy byte sequence

SYNOPSIS

      #include <strings.h>

      void bcopy(const void *src, void *dest, size_t n);

DESCRIPTION

      The bcopy() function copies n bytes from src to dest.  The result is correct, even when both areas overlap.

RETURN VALUE

      None.

cifssd command

NAME

      cifsdd - convert and copy a file over SMB

SYNOPSIS

      cifsdd [OPERAND]...

      cifsdd OPTION

DESCRIPTION

      This tool is part of the samba(7) suite.

      Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands.

      bs=BYTES

          read and write up to BYTES bytes at a time (default: 4096)

      ibs=BYTES

          read up to BYTES bytes at a time (default: 4096)

      obs=BYTES

          write BYTES bytes at a time (default: 4096)