Awk & sed Snippets for SysAdmins

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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Networking

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Home » Archive by Month

Article Archive for July 2018

The Mystery of a Hemisphere

July 31, 2018 – 4:00 pm

To make this long (and embarrassing) story short: a friend’s kid had a homework assignment in geometry to calculate the surface area of a conjoined cone, a cylinder, and a hemisphere.

Raspbian ‘partitions on different devices’ Error

July 30, 2018 – 3:59 pm

After downloading a Raspbian image and writing it to an SD card, you get the following error when trying to boot the Pi: “Could not expand filesystem, please try raspi-config or rc_gui. Boot and root …

Automating Web Page Screenshots

July 13, 2018 – 2:25 pm

Automatic Web page screenshots are commonly used for various monitoring tasks, such as detecting copyright infringement, website defacement, and other legal and security matters. Automatic screenshotting can also be a useful tool for researchers, developers, …

Commands & Shells »

Plundering Facebook Photo Albums

Let’s imagine you need to download all the photos in a Facebook photo album. It can be a public album, a friend’s, or even your own. Sure, you can do this manually, but you probably …

Scraping a Web Page in Bash

Just a scripting exercise because I need to do something important, but I am procrastinating. The idea is simple: grab some URL with text containing somewhat structured data and convert it into a spreadsheet. I …

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Applications »

Processing Videos with ffmpeg and Lightroom

On occasion I wondered how to apply advanced photo filters to my lackluster GoPro and drone videos. You know, not the basic exposure/contrast/saturation or the cheesy special effects you find in video editors, but something …

Searching Twitter

Here are just a few hopefully useful tips for searching Twitter to get more relevant results and buy cheap twitter followers.

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Data »

Scraping a Web Page in Bash

Just a scripting exercise because I need to do something important, but I am procrastinating. The idea is simple: grab some URL with text containing somewhat structured data and convert it into a spreadsheet. I …

Generating Random Text Files for Testing

Sometimes you need dummy folder structures populated with random data for testing your various scripts and processes – backups, file transfers, encryption, compression, etc. Every time I need something like this, I end up writing …

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Monitoring »

Finding Cron Jobs

Cron is an indispensable tool for system administration. The difficulties in working with cron in a large environment stem from its decentralized nature. Cron jobs multiply like rabbits, and keeping track of them is not …

Understanding Memory Utilization in Linux

This is a depressing – and all-too-common – scenario: a user runs the free command and opens a support case because he sees zero “free” memory on the server.

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