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Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten
Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?
i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection. :)
also, rxvt has another cool feature. aside from its shockingly minimalistic memory usage, run urxvtd and then urxvtc for every term you need open and it uses even less memory. what could possibly be better than that?
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
- emacs
- grep
- perl
- sed
- svn
- xml (manipulate XML from the command line)
- tar
- ssh (this one is fun: "ssh server tar -cf - directory | tar -xv")
- for (built-in bash command, one-line scripts from the command line are very useful)
- lsof (what processes have open network ports? why can't I unmount that disk?)
- wget
- ping
- telnet (test SMTP, HTTP, etc servers by hand)
- nmap
See also: Commonly used commandsYou're right - it's preposterous to think a sysadmin would want to download distro ISO's quickly.
I see that argument a lot, but y'know, I can download an ISO of any major distro via plain ol' FTP or HTTP as fast as my cablemodem will let me. What exactly would I gain by using P2P, other than yet another open port on my machine just waiting for someone to find an exploit?
Though, don't take this as an anti-P2P stance... P2P has its uses, and more efficient (for the server, not for any particular recipient) distribution of large files comes in pretty high on that list. But on this list, of the top 10 sysadmin tools - It doesn't come in at all. It duplicates funcationality (if via a slightly different mechanism) already present on a stock Linux box.
Why wasn't multitail mentioned? 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.