Sometimes, you just have to look into the raw data to see what your web server is doing. The logs might not show you enough detail or you suspect something is going on which is just not shown in the log files. Or, as in my case, logging is turned off because of too much […]

According to “official” system administrator rules and guidelines you shouldn’t be adding so-called vain scripts to the login prompt – only utilities that will add something useful to the system (for example, current system load, memory and disk usage, etc). However I have some systems that I frequently connect to and thought it would be […]

We received a tip from blog readers Christian and Michael for alternatives to the command to delete all directories older than a certain period of time. These both work in bash and can be used in scripts to clean up old backup directories or any situation where you need to delete old directories from the […]

My professor sent us this little one liner (ok, I had to format it to 2 lines to fit in this blog. You know what I mean) which prints out the current directory tree: ls -R | grep “:$” | sed -e ‘s/:$//’ -e ‘s/[^-][^\/]*\//–/g’ \ -e ‘s/^/ /’ -e ‘s/-/|/’ What’s going on here?

The Bash command environment, which is the namesake of this blog, is very flexible in that it allows you to manipulate the filesystem in many ways. Awk and sed are very powerful tools that allow you to do this rename with a simple one line command. This post will walk you through doing this with […]

Found a great post over at good coders code, great reuse. This one deals with performing operations on sets using only unix (bash) command line operations on files of text. * Set Membership. Test if an element belongs to a set. * Set Equality. Test if two sets contain the same elements. * Set Cardinality. […]

I created this Bash script as a project for the system administration course I’m taking for the summer. I’m sure there are bugs in it, so let me know if you find any. It basically uses an XML configuration file, which includes the source, destination, and any excludes from the transfer. You then pass either […]

Wow – I get so frustrated when I try to copy some files over old ones and I get: [root@server1 wordpress]# cp -Rf * ../public_html/ cp: overwrite `../public_html/license.txt’? y -R is recursive, but -f is supposed to copy over without confirmation. What could it be?! Check out your alias command using ‘alias’: [root@server1 wordpress]# alias […]