Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Some ideas on how to celebrate
Useful things that you can do on the command line with xargs
Brace expansion is one of the features of bash that is either never used or is one of its users favorite commands. The difference likely lies in unraveling the syntax just enough to understand how it works.
Unix aliases are generally extremely helpful, but watch out -- they can be used for mischievous ends.
You can't change history, but you can change the way it's displayed
Have you ever wanted to display messages on your screen so that you could read them standing on your head? Of course not, but you can!
Converting numbers to different numeric bases is easy on the Unix command line. Just learn a little syntax or stash your conversion commands in a script.
There's a Linux command that can help repair mistakes in the commands you type. Just don't say its name where your boss or customers can hear you.
You can do a lot more with your command line font colors than turn them on and off. How about picking your own colors? How about customizing your prompt so that it balks when you make a mistake?
If you haven't examined all the lines in the ifconfig output, you might find that there's more data there than you expected.
When a script is passed a file name as an argument, how can you tell if it's relative or absolute?
The top command's many options allow you to be creative when you're looking into system performance
Logger makes it easy to add custom messages to your system log files.
One simple command on a Linux system lets you calculate pi to as many digits as you have the patience to wait for
With the right group of options, you can get rsync to do just what you want and nothing more
Rsync is a lot more versatile than you might imagine and is a super tool for synchronizing your systems
Nine commands that do some very unusual things on Linux systems. Some could actually prove useful.
The dstat command can provide the data that you need when troubleshooting system problems or evaluating performance -- succinctly, easily, and to your specifications.
A huge collection of details about your Unix systems lies right under your fingertips. All you have to do is cd over to /proc.
Gain insights into the processes running on your Unix servers with familiar and unusual commands.
The dmidecode command can tell you a lot more about your Linux server's hardware than you'd ever want to know
The inside scoop on the infamous "bit bucket". Maybe even something you don't already know.
How can you create email on the command line -- or even better within scripts -- to tell you what's happening on the servers you manage?
History and command line editing can be tricky, but 2016 is the year of the monkey. Maybe it's time to monkey around.
Using cowsay and math commands to count down to those special days
Using the shopt built-in, you can change the nature of bash
If everything is a file, what's an inode?
We might just run out of time!
If you couldn't use the chmod command because it had somehow lost execute permission, what would you do to fix the problem? The many ways that you could go about restoring execute permissions to chmod might just give you some new insights into ....
Takes a look at the kind of information that might be stored in digital photos (possibly including your location) and shows how to use the exiftool to edit or remove it.
A different way to loop line-by-line in a bash script
The curl command is a versatile tool for working with web sites and web applications.
Pulling together stats to give you a better idea what a directory or file system contains
Questions sysadmins should ask and precautions they should take when troubleshooting
An introduction to automating processes built to be interactive -- using the expect command
Using awk to perform simple numerical calculations is easier than you might imagine.
Unusual things you can do with the vim editor
Identifying and generating prime numbers on Unix is easier than you might imagine
Using find commands to display important file system statistics
Using the join command to avoid quoting arguments
There are only two times when you need to dig through piles of data to get your job done: When you know what you're looking for and when you don't. Here are the best tools and techniques for both situations.
Listing group members on Unix systems, including commands and a helpful script
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