Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Items in the Linux Admin Toolkit
Joe Barr writes "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has listed his favorite top ten tools for Linux system administration in a story on Linux.com, one of Slashdot's sister sites." From the site: " Since I spend a lot of my time working with text files, either when I'm writing and editing or when I'm mucking with configuration files and shell scripts, I've become very attached to my editor of choice -- Vim. Over the years, I've tried a lot of other editors, but none of them has been sufficient to coax me away from Vim. Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity."
I've become very attached to my editor of choice -- Vim.
Emacs forever!!!
- BusyBox
- VIM
Condoms! With all the groupies chasing Linux system admins, you can never have too many condoms!
by far the most useful tool in troubleshooting.
.
What's telnet? :P
Yes, let's dig one of the oldest flamewars back up in the summary rather than discuss some of the article's other excellent information.
TFA mentions WGet, one of the most wonderful, most needed applications that most users and admins ON EVERY PLATFORM don't know they need. Why not focus on this rather than ressurect the text editor wars?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity, for a couple of weeks after which it may improve significantly.
I like vim for command line and something like textpad for GUI text editing. I've never tried Emacs, but then again I don't do a huge amount of text editing.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
nothing quite like a vi/emacs flame fight to cap off the afternoon, eh? thanks y'all!
d that bash has made some progress over the years, but zsh is my friend.
The autor makes a quick mention of vim, but what I'd really like to see is a full-blown developer session with vim, covering everything--common activities dealing with source, navigation, most used keystrokes, popular .vimrc mods, everything a "dyed-in-the-wool" GNU/Linux developer does when they are coding.
To take it another step further, a peer review and commentary about the session from other hardcore GNU/Linux developers at the end, so I can see the critiques, favorites, etc.
If anyone knows of such a article, or book, or could get such a thing started, I'd like to see it. The vim site is very helpful, but it is a lot more fragmented than what I'd like to see, something like "How the pros develop under GNU/Linux" with a full commentary/bull session attached...this would be very helpful to me.
Zonker is a great, and extremely smart guy. I had the opportunity to work with him for about 8 months at a data center. Anything I would have trouble with... and I mean ANYTHING, Zonker would always have the answer. He has lots of great articles, I recommend reading them!
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
Wget sucks, curl rules!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
It is suprising the author chose "telnet" as one of the programs in his list.
Sure it is useful for diagnosing random problems, and troubleshooting things - for example connecting straight to a webserver, or simulating a POP3 login request, but I've always preferred netcat.
netcat is much more useful, it allows you to bind to sockets and handling incoming requests as well as make outgoing ones this introduction is a good read.
Missing tools from the list? curl, links/lynx, rsync, sudo, nmap, lsof, and less.
When's the last time you used Linux? 1992?
I use Gentoo, and it handles just about everything for me, holds my hand through everything....And most other distros are even more friendly. The last time I had to set LD_* was with a strange and rare piece of software meant for Windows but designed with interoperability in mind.
You don't even need to compile a kernel these days, even with a radical change of hardware. Coldplug and hotplug manage it all for you.
Really, you should just try Linux for one day. You'll be searching for complaints, but you won't find more than "This isn't what I'm used to".
rm
preferably with the -Rf options.
Sony ha
It's been a while since I've seen someone fall so hard for such an obvious troll.
Kudos. Delicious Kudos.
But then, I've been using most of those tools for quite some time.
The one that interested me is cdb, which I hadn't heard of before. I'll have to try that out.
We use it to manage the RubyForge mirror system and it's a lifesaver. Check out the traffic dropoff chart that the mirrors provide (not the number of hits, the number of KB served); rsync really helps make RubyForge tick.
The Army reading list
Almost every machine has a telnet client installed, so it's nice to log in to my box and watch my bandwidth get plotted down on a graph in real time without having to VNC and use X for this. Try it.... Try nload, that is, do not try logging into my box please and thank you!
I feel like Ozymandius.
Sniffle.
Considering the article is posted in the "Enterprise Management" section of the site, does anyone else find it strange that one of his favorite "sysadmin" tools is for CD ripping? Guess he's not a very busy sysadmin.
1. vi
2. tcpdump/snoop
3. truss/strace/ktrace
4. ssh
5. wget
6. lsof
7. netstat
8. bash
9. dig
One of the most useful remote admin packages out there. Especially useful for those just getting into Linux/Unix. Want to install a Perl module? just select or enter the name. Wanna change a cron job for a user, it's in the Cron screen.
http://www.webmin.com/
I can't tell you how powerful zsh is! If your a UNIX person you have to get this shell. Way too many features to list here!
No really, read the release notes. Its a 'fantastic' example of everything that is wrong with linux.
cat .bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort
Mine: (flawed commands removed)
cal
cat
cd
cdd
random text to get past lameness filter - isn't this why we have mods? size does matter!
chmod
clear
cp
crontab
curl
du
echo
grep
random text to get past lameness filter - isn't this why we have mods? size does matter!
gunzip
head
kill
killall
links
locate
ls
lynx
mkdir
mv
random text to get past lameness filter - isn't this why we have mods? size does matter!
open
pbpaste
pico
pine
ps
rm
rmdir
scp
screencapture
random text to get past lameness filter - isn't this why we have mods? size does matter!
ssh
su
sudo
tail
tar
telnet
top
touch
unzip
uptime
which
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity.
:syn off)
Each time I login into a Linux box and have to edit a file, I end up with a multi colour screen in which it's hard to find anything and when I have to change a word ([^ ]+) up to the next space, my screen ends up full of yellow blocks.
Worst vi enhancement ever!
(yes I know about
bash$
I'll plug my own project here: Cream is Vim tricked out in single mode with all the development tools pre-configured with all useful shortcut keys self-documented in the pull-down menus. You won't need to go searching through the help ever again.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
1) perl 2) expect 3) wget 4) lsof 5) grep 6) lynx 7) ssh 8) emacs (I just know it better than VI) 9) bash 10) screen With those things running, I can pretty much do what I need. I have even installed them on slowlaris machines to make them more linux like.
my iBook is my most useful tool... A portable unix box that never needs to be messed with or tweaked to work!
Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity.
Strangely that's one thing I like about OS X. For some reason, many familiar emacs key combinations work in most OS X text controls.
Click here or here.
When did a CD audio ripper become an essential part of an admin's toolkit?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I love, love, love tcpdump and Ethereal. It's like an MRI for network issues. It has answered more WTF questions for me than anything else.
Similarly, strace and ltrace let me see what a program is up to on the local system, printing out a dump of every system or library call. Its invaluable when confronted with some mysterious error message: you can see exactly what the program was up to just before it barfed.
also, the pipe character
But some seamingly important pieces seem to be missing from most major commercial distros.
lsscsi (list SCSI device info including nodes and ID's) scsiadd (is there a new/better way to do this? Scsiadd is fine, but it wasn't part of the Centos toolkit and required some research and a compile. I'm not complaining, but adding and removing drives from arrarys seems like a pretty important function.) after that I supose I'm just going to be repeating variations of what everyone else says: sh/bash/ksh/etc vi wget ssh/sftp/scp telnet client (for general testing) nmap (god I love this program) smb client at least for mixed networks mdadm if your stuck with software raid grep less cat gawk Of course thats more then 10 already, but who really uses 10 or less tools to do the work? And frankly IMHO they are all favorites. Everytime I remote onto our SBS I'm reminded why.
Quack, quack.
I only use Emacs when i need to talk to my Psychiatrist. :p
Just kidding.
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/faq.html
1.3 What is curl not?
Curl is *not* a wget clone. That is a common misconception. Never, during
curl's development, have we intended curl to replace wget or compete on its
market. Curl is targeted at single-shot file transfers.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Last time I had to set LD_LIBRARAY_PATH: I couldn't get XOrg working on my machine, so I had to use XFree. The libraries shipped with XFree don't work with programs compiled with XOrg and vice versa. So, LD_LIBRARY_PATH to hack around it.
nmap
:)
tcpdump
ethereal
I thought these were some of the tools sysadmins use
sex is better than war!
The writer is a GUI user.. I can't really say I know much about some of the tools there. From my POV, SSH is a must in any list. Also, wont be able to live without "shutdown", since the servers we work with are remote.. so.. I guess that would make shutdown (-r ofcourse) #1 on my list :)
"From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen" - Cat Stevens
apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade
Oh. Not everyone uses Debian, right, sorry. They should, though. *mumbles*
"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?"
Everything here, except replacing vim with $EDITOR. Because everyone has their own favourite, but should learn one console capable editor.
"Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity."
And I'm so used to riding a horse I see no reason to move to one of those new "automobiles". It would hinder my productivity having to learn how to operate one. (Nevermind that I could actually get places faster.)
Hmmn, this is Linux. I thought the first thing you did with Linux was have a beer (or six) and a few roll-ups while surveying the damage. Sad there's no room for these. I think I'd also take a pack of Trojans as well. You never know. You might strike lucky while waiting long hours for machines to re-establish themselves in a large office full of rather bored people. Finally, an IRC client. This would enable me to cobble together a solution from the experts on one of the distro channels while passing it all off as my own work, plus keep up to speed with the footie results.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I cast my vote for Midnight Commander. It has a great built-in editor, does ftp (but not sftp, yet), opens files, and still allows me to have full access to the shell... I'm sure it does other things, but these are my primary uses. It's also been a great tool to help teach *nix to others. Take a bow Miguel.
As for coding, I prefer to write all of my code using NEdit. I started using it before it was a true OpenSource development, and it's only gotten better.
Hence, I pose a direct question to /.ers. Is Screen a "good thing" (TM)? If so, would you be so kind as to provide an example to supplement the one Zonker noted? On this list we have lots of clear examples of the usefulness of other tools. If Zonker is right, then it would be great to see examples of Screen, also.
There's no easier way to lay the blame squarely in the Windows camp (or to eat your hat)...
A few diagnoses I've performed:
I would say tcpdump is the #1 program for serious problem-solving -- at least with the work I did...
Now, some of those are "well-known", but there are plenty there that few people (even on Slashdot) are likely to be overly familiar with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As a person who uses vim for everything up to but not including sex with my wife, I gotta say you're right about the yellow blocks.
:set nohls
Try this --
(that stands for highlightsearch)
Or add it to your ~/.vimrc (sans the colon).
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I never thought much of Emacs keybindings, as they're not ergonomically assigned, sort of according to English mnemonics. Vi gets really close, but thanks to power of Eclipse, I made my own keybindings superior to either of those. Using control+i,j,k,l (and shift+ctrl for select, shift+alt+ctrl for by-word select) I never take my hands off the home row, while at the same time avoiding the pre-cursor key weirdness of Vi's dual modes.
Try it once, you'll love it forever.
All the best tools are the great networking tools which allow me to track down and eradicate owned windows machines on the network.
nmap - hmmm what trojan do we have on the network today
tcpdump - great at finding worms scanners
iptraf - for finding weird clients p2p movie downloaders etc.
ethereal - great for grabbing pop and telnet passwords
aimsniff - just for amusement
With just those couple of tools I can keep the helpdesk busy for weeks by finding owned machines that need cleaning.
Got Code?
cat .bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
After 10 years of doing system admin I have never needed a CD to mp3 translator. Really can't see that I ever will.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
The Linux cheat code:
rm -f -r /
Use responsibly.
ethtool and mii-tool. The Cisco 2970 switch we use has the knack of initializing the interface in half-duplex mode if the port is set to "Auto". Easily fixed by setting the port to Full, but useful nonetheless.
/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny, or where pop3/imap are looking for PEM certificates to configure pop3s/imaps, etc...
/proc filesystem. Favorites include /proc/net/dev, and /proc/uptime, /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/loadavg. Good for aggregating individual server load data in a cluster.
... permissive. Cut down on access to your logfiles and to config files in /etc.
.. might take a while. When you forgot to & your command, use CTRL+Z then bg your job.
strings. Good to check if executables are using
vmstat. Think your system is paging, or a card is generating too many interrupts?
awk and sed. Mentioned elsewhere, but priceless.
chmod. I think the Linux filesystem permissions are too
*quota*. A must for restricting disk space use.
umask. When you need root, set your default umask fairly tight. I use 0077, but when you need to cpan some common perl modules, switch to the more common 0022.
jobs, fg and bg. Old-school unix commands to play with jobs that
There may be more, but I can't think of any others right now...
I'm surprised at how few serious *NIX Administrators I know are using GNU Screen. For some reason, it seems that the majority of them have not yet discovered the sheer power of the console window manager. It allows me to manage dozens of virtual windows all within the same terminal. In addition to eliminating the need to window-switching on my local machine, it also allows me to perform complex select, copy, and paste operations using only my keyboard. WIthout using a mouse, I can select and copy text in one window, advance into another window, and paste the text. The best part is that if my DSL drops or I decide to reboot my computer, all of my screened sessions stay on the server, leaving my work in exactly the same place as it always was, and with a nice scrollback history. I couldn't work without it.
# wrote sig.txt, 23 lines, 31337 chars
man man man "Man, I give up."
You have been eaten by a Hurd of GNU.
nm
Like telnet? WTF... It is awkard.
... etc. :) I mean editors and password generators are in fact just tools - and as for tools they are a matter of a *prefference*. Essential things are like Samba or OpenLDAP - you need them, they are good. :)
I would point to OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, Samba, Your Favourite Storage Management System, Your Favourite Scripting Language, Your Favourite Intrusion Detection System, Your Favourite Editor, Your Favourite Shell, Your Favourite
FreeBSD
iusually is a big problem for me, as I'm so used to vi commands^[o
I just can't stop hitting escape after typing things!^[:wq
There are other useful tools, but I pretty much use those on every single box I touch for any reason.
What about lilo?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Absolutely right. When I first got started with linux, everything was very confusing. Webmin made it much easier to get things configured. The ability to do remote configuration hooked me on linux. Of course, now I always use ssh and do thing via CLI, but again I think it's important to introduce new users to these tools, since they help bridge between the "point and click" style of interfacing with the (more powerful) command-line administration. The fact that Webmin even gives you a CLI if you want it is great!
I don't consider editors much of a tool - really useful things for me are:
lsof
iostat
vmstat
tcpdump
nmap
ndd
nessus
... (as a sysadmin)
grep - Simple, Powerful, Elegant
sed - Powerful and versitile
awk - For what sed doesn't do easily
perl - For what awk doesn't do easily
vim - In the end there can be only one... it's vim.
cut - is your friend
make - automation is good and make makes it easy
lynx - great for testing web stuff
slrn - news, it keeps you sane after being locked in the closet for a month
mtr - just flatout helpful
Shadus
288 cd
263 ls
82 wine
66 time
49 less
46 man
41 sudo
40 ll
21 unzip
21 ssh
How about that? Run it and your social life will immediately improve. It is the first step toward a better life. Won't you take it today?
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
I don't think the tools he mentions are that interesting at all. In fact, many of the tools have nothing directly to do with sysadmin activities at all. I love abcde too, but what does have to do with Linux administration. GNU Screen does the same things as the default terminals that come with KDE (kterm) or Gnome (gnome-terminal), specifically one window tabbed consoles and detaching. The use of emacs or VIM or even nano is preference/needs based and could be the focus of an entire article, as it has been done before.
The only tool that was mentioned I found that I thought was worth mentioning was rsync. This is simply because it is not as well known as other tools. Although, its use has spread. I find people using scp or something else, manually or scripted, for things that would be handled much more efficiently with rsync.
To be fair, dig was worthy of mention, for the simple fact that many people who have become used to using nslookup don't know that another tool exists, perhaps even on their machine, that they may find more advanced. Also, pwgen could be useful, but not crucial by any means. I guess some of these tools may solve some annoyances people may have, but not necessarily working to improve or make the role of a sysadmin dramatically easier.
It would have been more useful to mention some monitoring tools or some web applications. For instance, tools that I would mention that help syadmin activities include the following:
- Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/ is a PHP application that uses RRDtool/SNMP to monitor server performance and usage (like disk space, CPU, load average, logged in users, and a lot more).
- phpMyAdmin/phpPgAdmin/phpLDAPadmin
- syslog-ng/php-syslog-ng (http://freshmeat.net/projects/php-syslog-ng/)
- Gregarius (http://www.gregarius.net/) is an a nice web RSS reader. I use this to keep up with the latest version of software releases, a lot of times using the RSS feeds available for all SourceForge.net projects, or otherwise using a feed that may be available on the software's website. Tiny Tiny RSS is another nice RSS reader (http://bah.spb.su/~fox/tt-rss/)
Since I work on a university campus, web applications help a lot b/c I can be in any lab or at home or on any PC and know exactly what is going on with all systems and even the development of the software that is used on them (RSS). But web applications are usually considered useful because access to them is easy and sometimes leave less room for human error.
Knoppix.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
From what I hear from the MS people here, one is already too many.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Plain and simple, zonk points out that you can not work all the time. Having that available allows you to rip to your local machine and then listen to them as you work. Made total sense to me.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and some applications I find useful.
Furthermore, I would love to see an article that focuses on some "lesser known tools" or "extremely useful that would save you a lot of time but no one talks about."
freeBSD
happy
"Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity"
In that case, if you ever want to try to learn Dvorak, you'll be in twice as much pain...I guess you've prematurely optimized for sub-optimal typing.
After that, you can always find tools available somewhere.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Man that post is funny.
Open Source Sushi
You type "mk" (as in "mark") and "rt" (as in "return") to mark a directory and later go back to it.
Or you can give it a name: do "mk foo", and later on "rt foo" will move you back there.
But the Big Win? With the above, it gets set as a shell var: $foo is also set to the directory, so you can do things like "cp $foo/*.baz ." to good benefit. In addition, setting up
this system is just a trivial matter of setting environment variables in your .profile.
PS: Trivia: the "mk" and "rt" names were inspired by troff, where those commands were used to keep mark and go back to vertical positions on a page... yeah I'm an oldie.
My text editor of choice depends on what I'm doing. Vim absolutely rules for config file editing, IMO nothing else touches it for this. I usually use either nano or pico if I'm doing something that requires word wrap (like say composing an email in pine). I tried emacs once or twice, but it had way too many options to wade through that I didn't need for what I was doing.
I found sed to be usful when I was writing shell scripts. Find for shure. And to amuse myself wall, for example, fortune -o | wall (add escape codes to kill your banner). Also ps can be important when things go wrong.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
My all-time most useful tool for dealing with multiple servers (think 'web farm') is the humble for-loop.
for host in www{0..9}; do
ssh $host "do stuff"
done
Works best when combined with ssh-agent for that wonderful lack of passwords.
Causation can cause correlation
2 absolutely must-haves: Tcpdump IPTraf I couldn't live without them
Why yes, I *AM* new here. Why?
the Linux-Is-Harder-Than-Windows crowd says?
"Part of the reason for that is the fact that I no longer have to think about using Vi-style keybindings, and adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity."
In other words, this moron is justifying using twice as many keystrokes to do a job because he doesn't want to spend the time converting to a GUI product.
Happy metacarpal tunnel syndrome, clown.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Midnight Commander is #1.
ddrescue #2.
and I'm not sure what else I need often enough to specifically include it. I'm working on a USB key system for emergency repairs and maintenence.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
1. vi
2. sh
everything else is application specific
Elinks has javascript support. I've deployed elinks to many systems as a last resort for the tech support crew when the ppp connect is hosed.
You may want to check out Tsync, one of the recent Google "Summer of Code" winners: "Tsync is a user-level daemon that provides transparent synchronization amongst a set of computers. Tsync uses a peer-to-peer architecture for scalability, efficiency, and robustness." Unlike rsync, Unison, etc., Tsync is a locally installed daemon which automatically and transparently syncs two or more hosts.
The biggest productivity gain I ever got working with my Linux boxes was when I put an OpenBSD gateway/firewall between the Linux boxes and the internet. Trollish, but serious.
Your /proc stuff if great, here's a handy accompaniment: ever logged onto a system and had no idea what it is? Maybe a crappy Dell Poweredge or whiteboxx kit, maybe a nice solid IBM/HP box? Wanted to get the system's asset tag for support reasons?
dmidecode. Part of the kernel-utilss package on most Linux distros.
Yeah, rm, With the options last.
/foo -rf
rm
Works fine. Yeah, it's GNU, not Unix. But if you git enter too early, you'll be glad.
treeps - To see what's going on, by whom and to kill/mod stuff! Also explore /proc ;)
locate - To find the files quick
man -k - To find the tools quick
DirRadar - To get places quick
sh -x - To see what script magic happens
awk - Still gawking after all those beers
grep - To cut to the chase
ssh/scp - MultiMachine magic tricks - ok to copy configs
find - still a nice power tool for subspace command execution
tar/gzip - Still the best transporter technology!
See http://www.orbit2orbit.com/gmd for treeps/DirRadar.
don't forget bittorrent
I can't seem to find a copy of that checkinstall program. The website seems to be down as of 1:06AM EST time. Would someone have a copy (source) that I could maybe have. It looks like a nice program to keep my self compiled programs as nice little .debs.
.deb of checkinstall the source would be just as nice.
:)
Unless someone knows of a
Thanks in advance
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
Seriously, for users of VIM, I could see this being a really nice extension thingy.
Some nice ideas you have going on there, digitect!
I'd mod you up if I had the points.
Bzflag!
I'm not a big fan of "vim", but it has its uses. One is looking at very large log files. Its large-file startup time is quite good, and it doesn't choke if you feed it a 50MB file.
Sorry for plugging my own project but I think MultiTail can be very usefull for a lot of admin tasks. MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such. For a complete list of features, look here. Multitail can be found here: http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
How does one force goddamn Less to display the contents of a html file instead of trying to render it?
Less is better in many ways than More, but often it tries to be smart TOO hard.
"This file may be binary, are you sure to open it?" on a text file containing native ISO-8859-2 characters, then showing inverse video hex codes junk in place of the characters instead of using properly configured console font to display them. More works okay, displaying the chars as they are. Same about unicode.
Please, make Linux commands do one thing and do it well, not to keep prompting the user "You might be an idiot. Are you an idiot (y/n)?"
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
No words about the text editor choice just like no words about your religion faith.
I don't like dig as well as the old-fashioned nslookup because of the tight coupling with BIND. I prefer the independent host (read chap.3), an historical DNS tool.
Finally, if I'd need to do some tests in TCP/UDP I'd choose either netcat or GNU-netcat.
Of course there is no perefect choice in a absolute sense. I simply have found these tools more effective than the other ones.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
As this table shows, curl does not have "Recursive Downloads", which wget does. Which is the most useful feature of wget - you can point it at a pr0n link or gallery site like so:
:)
wget -r -k -H --level=3
and it will follow all the pr0n links to three levels down, and retrieve all the pix/movies it links to. Saves you tens of hours of frustrated clicking and saving manually. Not that I personally use it for such vile things, of course
In the past, I did most of my CD-to-MP3 conversion with Grip, but since I was turned on to abcde, I've started using it more and more.
I just can't imagine any administration task you need CD ripping for. Can you?
Eleknader
If I'd known these when I tried emacs... My first encounter resulted in opening an extra window and killing emacs...
As I see it there are now 3 mainstreams in behaviour of tools, the stream using vi-like commands, the stream using emacs-like controls and a stream using intuitive controls... I hope the latter will prevail and that I can adept to this way of thinking. (for now, i prefer the vi-like controls)
Ah well, the times are changing... Adept or forget
... Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
rsync was there on his list. But what about grep? How can you live without grep?
cd /proc
ps
grep
ls
mv
|
netstat
vim
bash variables
sed
They are all tools that dont take a degree to use, and complete 90% of the tasks.
Man, you're so wrong :-)
/whatever
set -o vi is the first thing I type in any bash shell that is not my own.
You have the normal cursor keys for the command history normal line movement keys (wWBbfF etc...). Want to find an old command:
vi command editing is very powerful and useful
Bart
Here is my list of tools I can't live with in my admin life:
;))
#1: vim (My editor of choice for anything)
#2: netcat (beats telnet for the network testing forte)
#3: ssh-agent/ssh (for secure remote logins and other nice tricks (like tarring over ssh)
#4: nmap (for a quick network scan to see what hosts are up in an unknown network or an in depth portscan of a particular machine)
#5: perl (who needs shell script when you have perl
#6: mtr (cause traceroute is sooooo 1980's)
#7: screen (for those long taking operations on a bad network connection)
#8: grep (the all purpose filter/text finder with -r)
#9: find (flexible find/recursive operations tool)
#10: host (quicker and easier name resolves than dig)
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
No - the superlative is unclear as is the reason.
It should be this:
"netcat (nc) is the most bettererest than telnet at diagnostimicating"
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
- ssh (file transfers, port forwarding, encryption and remote login in one tiny tool. I even use it in place of WEP or WPA) /proc/cpuinfo, free etc. (Invaluable for hardware discovery. Boot a knoppix CD, run those commands and instantly you know everything about the hardware that you need to know.)
- pico (can't stand vi but pico is small and has enough of a help that I don't have to memorise keystrokes)
- grep, sed (with grep and sed, you can pretty much manipulate any file/program output into whatever you want, strip IP's out of errors/logs, etc.)
- x11vnc (like any other VNC program but supports Tight encoding and also lets me see what an EXISTING X session is doing. Combined with a script that seds/greps the auth code from the process list and you have automated remote desktop)
- screen (if for no other reason than it lets you start a job at work (like a kernel compile) and watch it's progress throughout the day even if you have to log off in between. And when you get home, you can still check on it)
- tinyproxy (wonderful small, easy to use web-proxy that I tunnel into from work to bypass the far-too-restrictive filters in the schools that I work in)
- slocate (worth it's weight in gold when you have it auto-indexing overnight across all filesystems. Where's that file I used ten years ago that had Xen in the name? a simple command, 2 seconds wait and you get the full path).
- dnsmasq (tiny util, bung it a massive list of public DNS servers and point your DNS requests to 127.0.0.1 and it will loop through them all until it gets a response. Failover to other servers, built-in full DHCP server, invaluable behind a NAT, simple config. Saved my life I-don't-know-how-many-times when my ISP DNS servers were feeling flaky. No one even noticed that half the time our ISP's weren't responding to DNS at all.)
- lsusb, lspci,
- dd, cat, more, sh, etc.(where would we be without them?)
find - Takes longer than slocate but does not require indexing. Also allows execution of commands on found files. Yummy. Probably my most used tool because I use it to execute other tools often. tar - Come on now. It is like sliced bread. (Can be replaced with cpio for those who do not like their bread sliced.)
Why not CVS?
/etc of my linux boxes since 2000. It works very well. /etc and make them recoverable. /etc is compromised by crackers.
/etc is its invasive architecture.
I have used CVS for
It can manage most of your change history for
It can even help you with ``cvs diff'' when your
One annoying point of CVS for
It always creates CVS/{Entires,Root,Repository}. This affects some app, so you
need to teach CVS not to handle some files/directories.
If you use non-invasive revision-control system (like SVK),
such problem might be avoidable. But I have not enough experience with it yet.
----
If you feel my english is strange, please correct me!
How can anyone claim to be productive without BASH COMPLETION?
Cfengine is a great Linux admin tool. Define configuration scripts once on a server, then they're automatically pushed out to each configured computer. Saves a lot of manual work keeping a bunch of servers consistent, and when I set up a new server, it's automatically configured by Cfengine.
Surely the job of a sysadmin is to get on top of everything, and then to be proactive in managing their systems. So, for me, things like Big Brother ( http://bb4.com/ ) and mrtg ( http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/ ) are the most useful. which editor you use is just a matter of preference. Personally I'm with the author ( and with telnet too ), but that's after 20+ years of picking up bad habits
with appologies to the real (unknown?) author, here are my favorites
who|grep -i blonde|talk|cd ~ | wine| talk| touch| unzip| touch| strip| gasp| finger| gasp| mount| fsck| more| yes| gasp| umount| make clean| sleep
This is newsworthy how? Here are my Top 10: cd ls top ssh netstat wall shutdown nmap BitchX exit
so interesting...
you canuse wget -A to only accept certain filetype for download, this way although it will traverse any structure of html's it will only save the particular file type you want. Also use -p to stay within the parent so it doesnt get crosssite ads and finally set the level which the gp explains.
Ya know, this however is the exact same thing that occurs with Windows. People are comfortable with its quirks and do not want to change to something new. Linux zealots scream that it sucks and this new thing is far better but then they also kick and scream when you try to get them to use a new editor or something outside their little turf that they are comfortable saying it sucks and they know how to use their old system
You sure about that? I think its a 'fantastic' example of everything that is wrong with proprietary softwware providers trying to passively adapt their products to the Linux environment. Take instead a mysql installation: yum install mysqld Or, if you're afraid of the command line, fire up synaptic click search type "mysql" , click the checkbox next to it, and click 'apply'.