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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 December 2021

Inventorying NFS Mounts and Mount Options

December 26, 2021 – 1:41 pm
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As time goes by, NFS mounts multiply like rabbits. Added by many different people over the years, these entries present a dizzying variety of mount options – most are a copy-paste job that makes little …

Automatic File Backups in VIM

December 21, 2021 – 1:37 pm
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Having to undo stupid changes to config files is an unfortunate side effect of too few sysadmins supporting too many servers. The VIM editor has some built-in file backup options. However, I find these options …

Joining Text Files and Data Columns

December 18, 2021 – 12:17 pm
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When working with application logs and other text files, it is often useful to view the contents of different source files side-by-side. Here we will take a quick look at various command-line methods for joining …

Convert Color Text to Images in Bash

December 11, 2021 – 12:14 pm
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The textmg is a cool little CLI tool written by jiro4989 – a systems engineer from Japan – that allows you to convert the color output in a terminal window to an image file. I …

Solving Crossword Puzzles from CLI

December 4, 2021 – 12:08 pm
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Linux command-line tools provide access to a wealth of dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, directories, and other reference sources. Learning to use these tools is a worthwhile endeavor even if solving crossword puzzles is not your favorite …