2.6 GNU Software

The toolkits developed by the GNU project are comprehensive. The following table lists just some of the 200 or more packages that you can obtain freely from http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html:

Package Description
aspell An interactive spell checker that suggests `near misses’ to replace unrecognised words.
awk A powerful yet simple pattern-based scripting language.
bash The Bourne Again SHell is compatible with the traditional Unix sh and offers many extensions found in csh and ksh. It is similar in concept to DOS.
bc An interactive algebraic language with arbitrary precision numbers.
binutils Consists of programs used to assemble, link, and manipulate binary and object files. It is used in conjunction with a compiler and various libraries to build programs for Linux.
chess A state-of-the-art chess-playing program.
cvs The Concurrent Versioning System used for version control and management of software projects.
emacs An extensible, customisable real-time display editor and computing environment. This editor is widely used by developers and is more than just an editor. Emacs is capable of reading email, of providing integrated development environments, and spreadsheets, to name just a few.
enscript An ASCII file formatter generating PostScript for printing of text documents on PostScript printers.
evince A document viewer for GNOME with support for viewing pdf, ps, djvu, tiff, and dvi files.
fileutils File management utilities.
findutils The ‘find’ utility is frequently used both interactively and in shell scripts to find files which match certain criteria and perform arbitrary operations on them.
gcc A free compiler collection for C, C++, Objective C and other languages. This compiler is used widely, on multiple platforms, including MS/Windows.
gdb A source-level debugger for C, C++ and Fortran.
ghostscript An interpreter for the Postscript and PDF graphics languages.


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