Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
The cd command is easy to use, but adding a couple tricks to your toolbox can make moving around, finding, and remembering the locations of files and directories simpler.
Using single and double quotes on Linux is easy if you know a few essential rules.
The watch command allows you to rerun commands in a loop until you stop it or run into a condition that stops the looping for you. It can be very useful when you're waiting for something to change before you can move on to the next task.
The Linux yes command allows you to automate responses to scripts and commands, but how it responds is up to you.
There are a lot of ways on Linux to make repeating commands easier than retyping them, and here's a nice collection of them.
New to Rocky Linux 9 is Peridot, a tool that makes it easy for anyone to replicate and extend Rocky Linux.
The eval command allows you to run the contents of variables as commands and can be very useful -- especially in scripts.
File names on Linux systems can be as long as 255 characters, and here's how to find the longest ones.
The Linux fold command can break long lines of text into pieces, but it can also be used to create arguments for looping in scripts.
The pa.sh tool finds sections of code that can run independently, then runs them in parallel to save time.
Linux marks time in the number of seconds since the start of the Linux epoch. Here's a script for using that information to figure how many days separate two dates expressed in traditional calendar notation.
A clever awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string.
Spend some time checking out the htop tool for viewing processes and system performance and you might just find it extremely handy when you need it.
If you have an Android cell phone, you can install an app that allows you to connect to your Linux system and run commands in a terminal session.
The script described here can change Linux systems' IP addresses from dynamic to static with much less manual work.
There are many ways to concatenate strings when you're using bash and += might just surprise you!
Linux provides a nice selection of commands for pulling substrings from text, but each has its own way of working.
Here's an introduction to running a Linux terminal inside a browser and some of the tools available to you.
strace and ltrace provide a flood of information about system and library calls being made by Linux processes, and sorting through it all can help discover the cause of problems.
Figuring out Wordle can be a lot of fun, but if it gets too frustrating, this Linux bash script can be your friend. Enjoy taking a look at how the cheating process works.
The whereis, whatis and which commands can provide information on Linux commands, but in spite of names that appear related, they provide very different answers.
Need to perform a long series of calculations? Let's look at a cool trick for making it easier.
Linux awk and uniq commands offer options for cutting out duplicate lines from Linux files.
The btrsfck command allows you to check the integrity of a btrfs file system. As file systems migrate to this newer file system format, this command is increasingly important.
The ldd displays the shared object files that a particular Linux command needs to run.
Fail2ban can detect attempts to connect to authenticated services such as ssh and put the offending connections in "jail". This article provides information on how to install, configure and test the tool on Fedora.
Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux.
The ClamAV command can identify and relocate files on Linux that have been infected by viruses, but not remove the viruses themselves.
Piping commands together on the Linux command line lets you get a lot more done with little effort. This post demonstrates this with a couple very useful commands.
The Linux host command can retrieve a lot of useful information from the domain name service, but has a lot of options that you need to understand to get started.
In Linux, the fold command can wrap text that displays wider than a monitor's width.
The Linux seq command generates lists of numbers, but it has many subtleties to master.
The Linux expand and unexpand commands can turn tabs into spaces and spaces into tabs, and the sed and awk commands can help.
The Linux hash command provides information about commands on your system or those you've run recently, but what you see depends on the shell you are using.
The look command allows you to extract lines from files that begin with a certain string. It's easy to use when you want to find words stored in the system's words file but can be little finicky when you want to use it on other text files.
How the true and false commands work, and how to put them to use on the command line and in scripts.
The Linux csplit command provides a way to break files into pieces based on the content of the files.
The beginning of a new year is always a good time to review what has gone well and not so well and make decisions about how you want to improve your work and your life.
The timedatectl command allows you to examine date and time zone settings and, if you need, to make changes
The ncdu command provides detailed data on disk usage by running through the contents of the current directory and collecting file sizes.
The whois and jwhois command can retrieve extensive details on domain registrations including domain registrants, domain status, responsible organizations and their locations.
While the dmesg command can display the entire contents of the Linux kernel message buffer there are ways to have it choose just what you want to see.
It's easy to add a few lines of text to files on Linux, but there are tools that make it easier to add many lines.
The script command not only makes a record of what commands you run but also allows you to save the output generated so that you can examine it later or easily turn your command sequences into scripts.
The bpytop tool works a lot like other performance monitoring tools, but gives you tremendous control over what it shows you.
The chpasswd command allows Linux admins to change passwords one at a time or many at a time. Here's what you need to watch out for.
The cheat command, available for installation on many Linux systems, provides an easy way to make cheat sheets available for hundreds of commands.
There are a number of ways to search the contents of compressed files while leaving the files intact. This post examines how to view, browse and search through many types pf compressed files.
The xargs command can come in very handy, especially when combined with find. Understanding how it works and how to implement a loop can help make it work for you.
Windows users can now more easily explore Linux on their Windows 11 desktops.
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