Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Linux provides very useful options for viewing file attributes, such as owners and permissions, as well as file content.
Typing the same command again and again can become tiresome. Here are a number of ways you can make repeating commands – or repeating commands but with some changes – a lot easier than you might expect.
Boost your Linux command line options and simplify your work with xargs, a handy tool for a number of data manipulation tasks.
An exit code other than 0 indicates that a script or a command has failed in some way. Learn more about exit codes and the types of errors they represent in this post.
The bash history feature can save you a lot of time when repeating commands or examining commands you’ve entered previously.
Linux systems provide many ways to view user activity, including when they login, how long they stay logged in, and what commands they run.
The top command is one of the most useful commands for getting a quick glimpse into how your Unix server is performing.
The diff, comm, cmp, and colordiff commands are among the many ways to compare text files on a Linux system.
The awk, cut, grep, expr, sed and xargs commands provide many useful options for manipulating text.
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.
There are many options you can use to find files on Linux, including searching by file name (or partial name), age, owner, group, size, type and inode number.
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.
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