Translations by Michael Vogt

This package provides the standard GNU file compression utilities, which are also the default compression tools for Debian. They typically operate on files with names ending in '.gz', but can also decompress files ending in '.Z' created with 'compress'.

utility to set/show the host name or domain name

This package provides commands which can be used to display the system's DNS name, and to display or set its hostname or NIS domain name.

scripts for initializing and shutting down the system

The scripts in this package initialize a standard Debian system at boot time and shut it down at halt or reboot time.

internationalized substitute of Text::Wrap

This module is a substitution for Text::Wrap, supporting multibyte characters such as UTF-8, EUC-JP, and GB2312, fullwidth characters such as east Asian characters, combining characters such as diacritical marks and Thai, and languages which don't use whitespaces between words such as Chinese and Japanese.

It provides wrap().

system login tools

These tools are required to be able to login and use your system. The login program invokes your user shell and enables command execution. The newgrp program is used to change your effective group ID (useful for workgroup type situations). The su program allows changing your effective user ID (useful being able to execute commands as another user).

Linux Standard Base 4.1 init script functionality

This package only includes the init-functions shell library, which may be used by other packages' initialization scripts for console logging and other purposes.

The Linux Standard Base (http://www.linuxbase.org/) is a standard core system that third-party applications written for Linux can depend upon.

a pattern scanning and text processing language

Mawk is an interpreter for the AWK Programming Language. The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and processing, and for prototyping and experimenting with algorithms. Mawk is a new awk meaning it implements the AWK language as defined in Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988. (Hereafter referred to as the AWK book.) Mawk conforms to the POSIX 1003.2 (draft 11.3) definition of the AWK language which contains a few features not described in the AWK book, and mawk provides a small number of extensions.

Mawk is smaller and much faster than gawk. It has some compile-time limits such as NF = 32767 and sprintf buffer = 1020.

Tools for mounting and manipulating filesystems

This package provides the mount(8), umount(8), swapon(8), swapoff(8), and losetup(8) commands.

terminal-related programs and man pages

This package contains the programs used for manipulating the terminfo database and individual terminfo entries, as well as some programs for resetting terminals and such.

change and administer password and group data

This package includes passwd, chsh, chfn, and many other programs to maintain password and group data.

Shadow passwords are supported. See /usr/share/doc/passwd/README.Debian

minimal Perl system

Perl is a scripting language used in many system scripts and utilities.

This package provides a Perl interpreter and the small subset of the standard run-time library required to perform basic tasks. For a full Perl installation, install "perl" (and its dependencies, "perl-modules" and "perl-doc").

The GNU sed stream editor

sed reads the specified files or the standard input if no files are specified, makes editing changes according to a list of commands, and writes the results to the standard output.

Utilities for sensible alternative selection

This package provides a number of small utilities which are used by programs to sensibly select and spawn an appropriate browser, editor, or pager.

The specific utilities included are: sensible-browser sensible-editor sensible-pager

System-V-like utilities

This package contains the important System-V-like utilities.

Specifically, this package includes: killall5, last, lastb, mesg, pidof, service, sulogin

GNU version of the tar archiving utility

Tar is a program for packaging a set of files as a single archive in tar format. The function it performs is conceptually similar to cpio, and to things like PKZIP in the DOS world. It is heavily used by the Debian package management system, and is useful for performing system backups and exchanging sets of files with others.

Tool for selecting tasks for installation on Debian systems

This package provides 'tasksel', a simple interface for users who want to configure their system to perform a specific task.

Miscellaneous system utilities

This package contains a number of important utilities, most of which are oriented towards maintenance of your system. Some of the more important utilities included in this package allow you to partition your hard disk, view kernel messages, and create new filesystems.

XZ-format compression utilities

XZ is the successor to the Lempel-Ziv/Markov-chain Algorithm compression format, which provides memory-hungry but powerful compression (often better than bzip2) and fast, easy decompression.

This package provides the command line tools for working with XZ compression, including xz, unxz, xzcat, xzgrep, and so on. They can also handle the older LZMA format, and if invoked via appropriate symlinks will emulate the behavior of the commands in the lzma package.

The XZ format is similar to the older LZMA format but includes some improvements for general use:

The ncurses library routines are a terminal-independent method of updating character screens with reasonable optimization.