Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Knowing how to work with and display exit codes on the Linux command line or in scripts can help make errors more obvious.
Stability, performance and adaptability are key attributes of Linux, which dominates cloud computing and supercomputing and is fundamental to IoT and containers.
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.
Pipes, aliases and scripts make Linux so much easier to use.
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.
Linux has a lot of options for displaying dates and times -- even for past and future dates. Take a look at how many ways you can elect to view this information.
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.
The more command on Linux may have a lot more options than you know and use.
The history command on Linux can be used to display and rerun commands that you've used, and it can also help you hide commands that you don't want remembered.
Linux systems support pipes that enable passing output from one command to another, but they also support 'named pipes,' which are quite different.
Moving a command or script that you're running on the command line to the background so that you can start another job and managing backgrounded processes requires only a handful of commands.
Assigning sudo privileges to users allows them to help manage the system by running commands that they would not otherwise be allowed to use.
Linux provides quite a few commands to look into file system types. Here's a look at the various file system types used by Linux systems and the commands that will identify them.
The >, >>, &, && and || characters are extremely useful whenever you're working on the Linux command line.
The mkdir command can create not just a directory but also a complex directory structure if you ask in the right way.
There are a lot of ways to get help on Linux, especially when you're getting started and want to learn a number of important commands.
There a quite a few ways to narrow your search when trying to find files on a Linux system.
PuTTY can do a lot more than allow you to log into Linux from another system. It also allows you to tailor your window in several ways.
Linux provides a number of ways to control who has access to your files and what kind of access they have.
Setting up aliases on Linux systems can save you a lot of time and trouble on the command line. This post shows how to set up and manage aliases and provides a number of examples on how and why to use them.
The convert command (part of ImageMagick) can change the resolution of image files faster than you can count to F in hex.
The grep command offers interesting options to help you find what you want from text files.
Viewing the content of files and examining access permissions and such are very different options. This post examines a number of ways to look at files on Linux.
Here's how to learn about the many bash builtins you might be unfamiliar with.
The netstat command can display an overwhelming amount of network statistics. Ready to make your focus a little easier with a series of aliases?
The ncdu command provides a convenient way to review files and the disk space being used on Linux systems, but the file sizes may appear a little strange at first.
Check out how you can ensure that proper arguments are passed to your bash scripts.
The at command allows you to run a task on a Linux system at any time or date you specify.
The Ctrl-x-e key sequence provides a quick and easy way to save commands you've recently used on the command line into files.
The dict command on Linux can provide you with access to a large collection of dictionaries, many with a special focus.
Here's how to change your Linux command prompt to something you might like better.
Here are some steps you can take to ensure that your bash scripts work as intended and are easy to update.