If you're familiar with Unix-style operating systems, you'll feel right at home with QNX Neutrino—many people even pronounce “QNX” to rhyme with “Unix” (some spell it out: Q-N-X).
At the heart of the system is the microkernel, procnto, surrounded by other processes and the familiar Korn shell, ksh (see the Using the Command Line chapter). Each process has its own process ID, or pid, and contains one or more threads.
QNX Neutrino is a multiuser OS; it supports any number of users at a time. The users are organized into groups that share similar permissions on files and directories. For more information, see Managing User Accounts.
QNX Neutrino follows various industry standards, including POSIX (shell and utilities) and TCP/IP. This can make porting existing code and scripts to QNX Neutrino easier.
QNX Neutrino's command line looks just like the Unix one; QNX Neutrino supports many familiar utilities (grep, find, ls, gawk) and you can connect them with pipes, redirect the input and output, examine return codes, and so on. Many utilities are the same in Unix and QNX Neutrino, but some have a different name or syntax in QNX Neutrino:
| Unix | QNX Neutrino | See also: |
|---|---|---|
| adduser | passwd | Managing User Accounts |
| at | cron | |
| dmesg | slogger2, slog2info | |
| fsck | chkqnx6fs, chkdosfs | |
| ifconfig eth0 | ifconfig en0 | TCP/IP Networking |
| man | use | Using the Command Line |
| pg | less, more | Using the Command Line |
For details on each command, see the QNX Neutrino Utilities Reference.