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."

Comments

Mine

[hackstraw]

In alphabetical order:

• [rs]sh - enables me to go places w/o passwords, copy files, and remotely execute commands. I can't live without it
  
• cron - does my work for me while I sleep, and mails me the results in the morning
  
• grep - the filter of filters. Keeps down the signal to noise ratio
  
• less - the pager of pagers. With a proper lessopen/pipe, you can do what no man has done before. You can go backwards in files, although I guess some 'more's can do this now. Less always can. It also highlights text searches so I don't have to search for what I just searched for.
  
• man - that's where they hide the documentation. Shame on those that only provide info, text, or worst, html documentation (or none)
  
• perl - anything that any other command cannot do, or cannot do well enough, perl can with some coaching.
  
• rsync - although its binary diff algorithm is not very good, rsync is close to heavenly, especially
• when teamed with [rs]sh and cron
  
• telnet - no, I never telnet to login to a machine, but I do it to test if a port is open, what's listening there, etc. very handy.
  
• vim - good editor, I can live with vi, but that makes me a little grumpy. I simply do not know or care to learn emacs. Its just a text editor.
  
• zsh - excellent shell. Very user friendly, consistent error messages, powerful. It can do anything any other shell can do and more. I understan
  d that bash has made some progress over the years, but zsh is my friend.
  
• /dev/null - where I put all of my important stuff. So should you!
  
  
• Honorable mention - /bin/sh Only because it is always there by definition on UNIX systems, and a good shell programming language. tcsh, csh, and zsh are not as good as /bin/sh, and its always available, but a little boring to write about.
  

Telnet ...?

[stevey]

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.

Cream for Vim

[digitect]

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.