Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
It's not hard to look up configuration details on your Linux system. The hard thing is wrapping your brain around how many are available and what they can tell you.
Here are eight Linux commands for looking into binary files and viewing details about what executables are doing when they run.
The sar command can provide detailed system metrics on just about every aspect of system performance. You can query it on as as-needed basis or set it up to provide daily reports.
When a Linux user finds his system nearly out of disk space and unwilling to save files, fellow Linux users online provide a solution.
The where, whereis and whatis commands summarize commands, show where executables are, and point to relevant man pages.
Bash provides some handy techniques for troubleshooting bash scripts, and they're very easy to use.
You can examine the contents of compressed files on Linux systems without uncompressing the files or changing them in any way. This post explains the commands for doing that and the types of compressed files they work with.
Gimp is normally used to create or manipulate images files, but can also work with PDFs if you understand how it works and what it's limits are.
Linux has many tricks that can reduce the number of keystrokes it takes to type in commands. Here are six of them.
Setting up the most useful aliases on Linux is a mix of what's otherwise annoying to enter, hard to remember or typed way too often.
Red Hat has outlined how it can bundle existing and new features to better support edge networks, an effort it calls Red Hat Edge.
You can make accessing some applications on Ubuntu quite a bit easier by adding them to the dock. In this post, we look at how you can manipulate the dock -- adding applications, changing the size of its icons and even moving it to a different locati....
Here are five Linux commands that can verify connection speeds, analyze delays, and test whether other systems are reachable.
Ubuntu gives you control of what files show up on your desktop – even if they're not in your Desktop folder.
There are many ways to get help while working on the Linux command line. Here are details on some of the most useful.
Sometimes a new way of getting work done on the Linux command line can be both interesting and time-saving
A couple of simple Linux commands can provide a lot of information about the systems and devices attached to your network.
File systems and UUIDs have a special relationship on Linux systems. What are these very long identifiers and how can you view the connections between them and disk partitions?
If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start.
Linux systems offer a lot of choices when it comes to generating, converting or merging PDF files. This post examines some easy-to-use options.
Command history on Linux and Unix systems provides a lot more ways to rerun commands than you might know.
Many new tools for comparing files have emerged in Linux over the years. In this post, we'll examine seven very useful tools for doing that.
Generating a list of names, addresses and phone numbers can be very easy when you know what tools to use. Let's take a look at the rig command.
Solving problems with bash can be challenging, not just for us using Linux, but also for bash.
A vulnerability in sudo can elevate unprivileged users to root privileges.
Most Linux users know vim as a text editor that descended from vi. It can also function as a tool for encrypting text files. In this post, we examine how this is done and how to reverse the process.
Linux systems provide a lot of useful commands for reviewing network configuration and connections. Here's a look at a few, including ifquery, ifup, ifdown and ifconfig.
The lslogins command can help you look into details of user accounts and login activity
The expect command can make running scripts a lot easier, especially if you need to run them repeatedly or when you're at home asleep.
In Linux, the arp and ip neigh commands provide easy ways to check your local network.
Linux has a wealth a powerful tools to make working with it easier and more productive, and here are some tips for taking advantage of them.
Wikit is a clever command for running Wikipedia searches from the Linux command line. It can help you run searches and save the output in text files. Take a look at how easily it works and learn what you need to know to get the content that you'....
The arping command can ping local systems to find out whether they are responsive, and with the help of scripts, can ping specific IP-address ranges.
Want to add a personal image or company logo for using with cowsay? It's easier than you might think to become a cowsay Picasso.
The pidof and pgrep commands make selecting and using process IDs on the Linux command line painless.
Here's how to use screenfetch and neofetch tools to display some of the most important configuration information on your Linux system.
The Linux sort command has an impressive number of ways to sort, from alphanumeric to random. Here's a look at some of the more useful ones.
Failed logins can be legitimate human error or attempts to hack your Linux system, but either way they might flag something that warrants attention.
The ps command makes it fairly easy to sort its output by any column of data. In fact, you can sort it in the normal or reverse order. In this post, I'll present the --sort option and show how to use it. I'll also touch on how to pass ps ou....
Adding a tag to a Linux command can make it a little easier to reuse it. If you're struggling to remember complex commands or important locations in the file system, tags might help you out.
Midnight Commander is a powerful tool that provides an easy way to browse, compare, move, modify and manipulate files.
The usermod command allows you to make a lot of different changes to user accounts without having to carefully edit files like /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group. It's definitely worth your time to look into it.
When you disown a Linux process in bash, you keep it from being terminated when you log out and allow it to finish on its own. This post shows how to use the disown command.
Linux gives you lots of ways to create complexity in passwords that include a lot more than just length, such as mixing upper- and lower-case letters with numerals and punctuation marks along with other restrictions.
The youtube-dl tool makes it very easy to download both webm and mp4 files on Linux systems. You just need the tool and the right URLs.
Ranger is a great tool for providing a multi-level view of your Linux files and allowing you to both browse and make changes using arrow keys and some handy commands.
This post describes testdisk, one of the tools that comes in handy for recovering recently deleted files (along with fixing partitions in other ways).
The lshw (list hardware) command on Linux systems provides a lot more information on system devices than most of us might imagine is available.
The shopt builtin offers 53 settings that can alter how bash behaves. Read this post and then refer to bash's man page to follow up on how these settings might work for you.
The stat command isn't only for looking at file details one file at a time. It can also be used to create file listings that contain just the information you want to see – with considerably more than an ls -l command.
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