Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
There are a number of spelling assistants you can use on Linux systems, including aspell, enchant-2, look, and grep. Some commands will need to be installed on your system.
Exiting a script and logging out are very different, but sometimes you may need to log out of your Linux system from within a script. Here's how to do it.
Want to do a quick performance check on your Linux system? You might want to take a look at the dstat command.
There are many ways to clean up or remove files, including using commands such as rm (remove), rmdir (remove directory), shred, and unlink.
Linux has a lot of options for displaying dates and times, even for past and future dates. This post explains many of these options and provides examples of what you can expect to see.
Some of the most convenient ‘tricks’ on Linux depend on the use of a handful of special characters. This post looks at a number of command operators on Linux and shows how they work.
The Linux find command makes it easy to find files on your system – even if you don’t remember their names or exactly when you last updated them. Some of the options are a bit more challenging than others, but all are very handy. This pos....
There's a lot more to printing from the Linux command line than the lp command. Check out some of the many available options.
Converting text between uppercase and lowercase can be very tedious, especially when you want to avoid inadvertent misspellings. Fortunately, Linux provides a handful of commands that can make the job very easy.
The pv command is especially helpful when you are running tasks that take a long time to complete and you want some feedback that displays your progress.
Running processes in the background can be convenient when you want to use your terminal window for something else while you wait for the first task to complete.
Case statements can allow you to simplify the logic of your scripts.
The zip command lets you compress files to preserve them or back them up, and you can require a password to extract the contents of a zip file.
These AND and OR equivalents are often used in scripts to make decisions about what happens next. In this post, we’ll take a look at how they work at a very basic level and some ways they are often used in scripts.
The apropos command on Linux identifies commands that relate to the particular terms that you are asking about – such as files, lists, disks, dates users, accounts, file systems, and a huge pile of other things.
The shred command is a good option for removing files from a Linux system in a way that makes them virtually impossible to recover.
If you manage Linux servers, it’s a good idea to understand how much they're being used and which users are making the heaviest use of them. A few Linux commands offer different ways to see which users are logging into your Linux servers, ....
Directories provide a hierarchical way to organize your files, and you can categorize them to suit your needs.
Aliases provide an easy way to reuse complicated or often-used commands.
Leap years are not quite as regular as we might have believed. A fairly simple Linux script can tell you whether a year will be a leap year or not.
Requiring password changes is a common security practice, and Linux systems admins can use the chage command to view and change password expiration information.
You can use the stat command to view dates and times associated with Linux files, and the date command can do some handy conversions if you’d like to display the current time in the epoch format.
Configuring and managing Linux accounts is fairly easy once you get used to a handful of commands.
Installing and updating the OS, managing user accounts, and looking after security are just a few of the primary responsibilities of a Linux systems administrator.
With the right command, you can do anything from simple math to fairly complex calculations on Linux.
Linux tricks can help you get work done faster, especially when they're easy. Here are some ways to find files, reuse prior commands, stop processes and more.
The Linux df command provides a lot of useful information on file system usage.
Knowing how to work with and display exit codes on the Linux command line or in scripts can help make errors more obvious.
When writing scripts, it’s important to know how to test and validate variables.
Case statements allow your scripts to react differently depending on what values are being examined.
Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments.
Linux tricks can make even the more complicated Linux commands easier, more fun and more rewarding.
Some of the most versatile commands you can run on the Linux command line are those that enable you to pass the output of one command to another by using something called a “pipe”. You can also set up complex commands as “aliases&rd....
Our Linux cheat sheet includes some of the most commonly used commands along with brief explanations and examples of what the commands can do.
Commands that provide help are essential. Here's a look at some of the help you can get from the Linux system itself.
This series of posts will help Linux/Unix newbies to feel comfortable on the command line.
The Linux compgen command is a bash builtin that's used to provide different varieties of information.
Linux offers a lot of helpful commands for doing math on the command line.
The arguments and options you use on the command line can make command output easier to use.
The nohup command can allow a long-running process to run to completion even after you log off.
Some simple Linux commands allow you to break files into pieces and reassemble them as needed. In this post, we'll look at the split command and some of its more useful options.
Linux offers a couple of easy ways to record commands you type so that you can review or rerun them.
The echo command is simple, except when it isn't. Here's a look at the basic command along with some of the more challenging things it can do.
Since 2004, October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Here's a review of what that means, plus a list of open-source and free cybersecurity tools to consider.
The fortune command might be more versatile than you realize.
The curl and the wget commands make it easy to download content from web sites.
Linux provides a lot of handy commands for manipulating text files. This post explains how to use a collection of them.
The Linux comm command makes it easy to compare a couple text files and determine if they both contain the same lines -- whether the file contents are sorted or not.
There are quite a few ways to increment and decrement numeric variables in bash. This post examines the many ways you can do this.
With a handful of commands and a trick or two, you can move around the Linux file system with ease and never get lost.
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