UNIX has always been known for its sometimes obscure online "man pages" documenting the hundreds of individual utilities that give so much power to accomplished users and so much confusion to newcomers.

While these individual program reference pages make no effort to provide a tutorial introduction to the programs they describe, they are an invaluable reference tool. Nothing beats the ease of lookup of an alphabetical listing for each program, and often, when faced with a hard problem, you will find special nuggets of wisdom in the terse, but precise, documentation of the people who originally wrote the programs.

This volume collects the man pages for the more than 275 user programs that make up the user portion of the 4.4BSD UNIX release (section 1 of the online man pages), plus additional pages for games (section 6 of the online manual) and miscellaneous information (section 7, which includes mostly information on troff macro packages and other text processing information).

This volume is useful even if you don't use the BSD version of UNIX. Many of the commands are identical to those in other UNIX versions, and because 4.4BSD includes many freeware programs that are available (but not necessarily included in the manuals) with other versions of UNIX, you may find yourself turning first to this book to look up options for programs like Perl, GNU emacs, compress, patch, g++, or kerberos.

The information in this volume is useful not just for 4.4BSD systems, but also for many related UNIX implementations, including SunOS, BSDI, and Linux.