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March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

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Article Archive for July 2016

Nohup Without Nohup.out

July 13, 2016 – 12:55 am
shell

This is a common question: how can I run nohup without creating the annoying nohup.out ? And the common answer is: you can’t. But this is not exactly true.

Socket Statistics ss Command

July 11, 2016 – 8:10 pm
network_005

This is a small collection of useful ss (written by Alexey Kuznetsov of the Russian Nuclear Research Institute) syntax examples that go beyond the basics covered by other sources. Here’s one I use often: it shows established connections to …

Filesystem Synchronization with Freehold

July 8, 2016 – 2:43 am
picard-facepalm-text-569

Whenever an application description begins with phrases like “runs on anything” and “is easy to setup”, attribute such bravado to the author’s lack of experience outside his development sandbox. Freehold comes as a tarball for “any Linux” …

Osync and DiffTree

July 8, 2016 – 1:49 am
filing cabinet files

Think of osync as a kind of rsync that is more suited for making backups. While rsync certainly has more options, osync takes a lot of the complexity out of writing a backup script with a few options that are …

Improving Your Scripts with ShellCheck

July 7, 2016 – 8:42 pm
968780_94091618

Unlike most other popular scripting languages, Bash has few style-checking utilities. The best one, I think, is ShellCheck – a very cool and useful utility that can greatly  enhance robustness of your scripts. Like that time …