Basic OS management

Now it's time to take a quick tour of some basic system management commands, which may be useful in the next sections.

You should notice that the following commands can be used indifferently into each developer kit presented in this book as is in the host PC as is in any other GNU/Linux-based OS! This is a really important feature of GNU/Linux systems that allows a developer to have the same command set into its working machine as the one in the embedded devices.

For the sake of simplicity, the following examples are executed into the host PC.

File manipulation and Co

One of the main principles of Unix systems is that everything is a file. This means that in a Unix system, (almost) everything can be accessed as a file! So we can use the same commands to read/write a file for every peripheral connected to the system (that is, disks, terminals, serial ports, and so on).

Since this book's main goal is to show you how to get access to the system's peripherals...