Appendix A. Package descriptions

Table of Contents
Introduction
Glibc
Linux kernel
Ed
Patch
GCC
Bison
Mawk
Findutils
Ncurses
Less
Groff
Man
Perl
M4
Texinfo
Autoconf
Automake
Bash
Flex
Binutils
Bzip2
Diffutils
E2fsprogs
File
Fileutils
Gettext
Grep
Gzip
Ld.so
Libtool
Bin86
Make
Shellutils
Shadow Password Suite
Modutils
Procinfo
Procps
Vim
Psmisc
Sed
Sysklogd
Sysvinit
Tar
Textutils
Util Linux
Console-tools
Console-data
Man-pages

Introduction

This appendix describes the following aspect of each and every package that is installed in this book:

The packages are listed in the same order as they are installed in chapter 5 (Intel system) or chapter 11 (PPC systems).

Most information about these packages (especially the descriptions of it) come from the man pages from those packages. I'm not going to print the entire man page, just the core elements to make you understand what a program does. If you want to know full details on a program, I suggest you start by reading the complete man page in addition to this appendix.

You will also find that certain packages are documented more in depth than others. The reason is that I just happen to know more about certain packages than I know about others. If you have anything to add on the following descriptions, please don't hesitate to email me. This list is going to contain an in depth description of every package installed, but I can't do this on my own. I have had help from various people but more help is needed.

Please note that currently only what a package does is described and not why you need to install it. That will be added later.