Linux Tech Tips

Why Bother? Why do you need to learn the command line anyway? Well, let me tell you a story. A few years ago we had a problem where I used to work. There was a shared drive on one of our file servers that kept getting full. I won't mention that this legacy operating system did not support user quotas; that's another story. But the server kept getting full and it stopped people from working. One of our software engineers spent the better part of a day writing a C++ program that would look through all the user's directories and add up the space they were using and make a listing of the results. Since I was forced to use the legacy OS while I was on the job, I installed a Linux-like command line environment for it. When I heard about the problem, I realized I could do all the work this engineer had done with this single line: du -s * | sort -nr > $HOME/user_space_report.txt   Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are helpful for many tasks, but they are not good f...

Many of us who love to work on Linux enjoy the privilege of using a plethora of commands and tools. Here is our effort to introduce you to a few very simple- to-use, yet enormously effective commands. The intended audience may belong to all classes of Linux users and the only requirement is to have a basic acquaintance with Linux. Our article deals with bash shell and Linux version Fedora 9, kernel 2.6.25. Often, commands on the console may span many lines, and encountering a type mistake at the beginning of the command would require you to use the slow way of punching the right/left arrow keys to traverse in the command string. Remedy: Try Ctrl+e to move to the end of the command string and Ctrl+a to reach start. It’s the fastest way to edit a Linux command line. To delete a word in the command string, use Ctrl+w. Another wonder of a simple shell variable is !$ . Let’s say you have to create a directory, go into it and then rename it. So the flow of commands would ...