Advice for everyday Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Want to add color to the command line on Linux? You can create colored text in your scripts and use color settings to change the background of your screen.
Popular free and open source PDF editors include LibreOffice, PDFSam, PDFedit, ONLYOFFICE and Xournal++.
Learn how to manage file permissions, view commands, access system details, compare files, and display running commands.
These 25 commonly used commands are ideal for newcomers who want to get started on the Linux command line.
There are plenty of commands to choose from when you want to know how hard your disks are working or identify potential slowdowns.
Looping forever is easy if you know what commands you want to run repeatedly and the conditions under which you want them to stop running.
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.
Linux systems provide many ways to view user activity, including when they login, how long they stay logged in, and what commands they run.
September is designated National Insider Threat Awareness Month, according to a group of federal agencies and tech industry organizations.
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.
After 30 years managing Linux servers, I've found these practices helped me stay focused and effective.
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.
The Linux find command makes it easy to find files on your system – even if you don’t remember their names or exactly when you last updated them. Some of the options are a bit more challenging than others, but all are very handy. This pos....
With contributions from Red Hat and critical collaborators, the safety and security of automotive vehicles has reached a new level of reliability.
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.
Case statements can allow you to simplify the logic of your scripts.
The zip command lets you compress files to preserve them or back them up, and you can require a password to extract the contents of a zip file.
Email spoofing is acknowledged by experts as a very credible threat.
These AND and OR equivalents are often used in scripts to make decisions about what happens next. In this post, we’ll take a look at how they work at a very basic level and some ways they are often used in scripts.
The apropos command on Linux identifies commands that relate to the particular terms that you are asking about – such as files, lists, disks, dates users, accounts, file systems, and a huge pile of other things.
The shred command is a good option for removing files from a Linux system in a way that makes them virtually impossible to recover.
If you manage Linux servers, it’s a good idea to understand how much they're being used and which users are making the heaviest use of them. A few Linux commands offer different ways to see which users are logging into your Linux servers, ....
Directories provide a hierarchical way to organize your files, and you can categorize them to suit your needs.
The annual World Backup Day, which is March 31, is a good reminder to review your backup policies and practices.
Aliases provide an easy way to reuse complicated or often-used commands.
Leap years are not quite as regular as we might have believed. A fairly simple Linux script can tell you whether a year will be a leap year or not.
Requiring password changes is a common security practice, and Linux systems admins can use the chage command to view and change password expiration information.
While the desktop is not Linux's claim to fame, Linux still offers a huge number of distributions that can make your desktop computer work just like you'd want.
Open source code makes a lot of difference when it comes to how you can tailor an OS, adjust it to meet your needs, and fit it to the required tasks – whether large or huge.
You can use the stat command to view dates and times associated with Linux files, and the date command can do some handy conversions if you’d like to display the current time in the epoch format.
Configuring and managing Linux accounts is fairly easy once you get used to a handful of commands.
Red Hat executive Francis Chow outlines the company's strategy for using Red Hat Linux for flexible manufacturing.
Installing and updating the OS, managing user accounts, and looking after security are just a few of the primary responsibilities of a Linux systems administrator.
With the right command, you can do anything from simple math to fairly complex calculations on Linux.
Linux tricks can help you get work done faster, especially when they're easy. Here are some ways to find files, reuse prior commands, stop processes and more.
The Linux df command provides a lot of useful information on file system usage.
Knowing how to work with and display exit codes on the Linux command line or in scripts can help make errors more obvious.
