The red prompt is a good idea, which I also use. Another trick is to put a large ASCII-art warning in the /etc/motd file. Having something like this greet you when you log in should get your attention: _______ _ _ _____ _____ _____ _____ |__ __| | | |_ _|/ ____| |_ _|/ ____| … Read more
For more data on the layout of Linux file-systems, look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (now at version 2.3, with the beta 3.0 version deployed on most recent distros). It does explain some of where the names came from: /bin – Binaries. /boot – Files required for booting. /dev – Device files. /etc – Et … Read more
I have a little script that extracts archives, I found it somewhere on the net: extract () { if [ -f $1 ] ; then case $1 in *.tar.bz2) tar xvjf $1 ;; *.tar.gz) tar xvzf $1 ;; *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;; *.rar) unrar x $1 ;; *.gz) gunzip $1 ;; *.tar) tar xvf $1 … Read more
Use the -f flag to print the canonicalized version. For example: readlink -f /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt From man readlink: -f, –canonicalize canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given name recursively; all but the last component must exist
You can use the @ syntax to look up the domain from a particular server. If the DNS server is authoritative for that domain, the response will not be a cached result. dig @ns1.example.com example.com You can find the authoritative servers by asking for the NS records for a domain: dig example.com NS
Another command that might be available and also works quite well for this is ‘blkid’. It’s part of the e2fsprogs package. Examples of it’s usage: Look up data on /dev/sda1: topher@crucible:~$ sudo blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: UUID=”727cac18-044b-4504-87f1-a5aefa774bda” TYPE=”ext3″ Show UUID data for all partitions: topher@crucible:~$ sudo blkid /dev/sda1: UUID=”727cac18-044b-4504-87f1-a5aefa774bda” TYPE=”ext3″ /dev/sdb: UUID=”467c4aa9-963d-4467-8cd0-d58caaacaff4″ TYPE=”ext3″ Show UUID data … Read more
The best method is to start the process in a terminal multiplexer. Alternatively you can make the process not receive the HUP signal. A terminal multiplexer provides “virtual” terminals which run independent from the “real” terminal (actually all terminals today are “virtual” but that is another topic for another day). The virtual terminal will keep … Read more
Avoid using /etc/mtab because it may be inconsistent. Avoid piping mount because it needn’t be that complicated. Simply: if grep -qs ‘/mnt/foo ‘ /proc/mounts; then echo “It’s mounted.” else echo “It’s not mounted.” fi (The space after the /mnt/foo is to avoid matching e.g. /mnt/foo-bar.)
You can use the lsb_release command on various Linux distributions: lsb_release -i -r This will tell you the Distribution and Version and is a little bit more accurate than accessing files that may or may not have been modified by the admin or a software package. As well as working across multiple distros. For RHEL, … Read more
Why not use -C option when creating: $ tar cf /var/www/site.tar -C /var/www_bak/ site