Category: tips-n-tricks

Many people of you out there might highly disagree with me but I am very lazy ;). Just last night I had to run a FSCK on a box at work. Initially, I was a bit hesitant only because it meant that I had to get off my “forth point of contact” and I just […]

One of the coolest and best tools that I use at work on a regular basis for all things systems administration is LSOF, or “list open files”. lsof lists information about files opened by a process. It can also list any opened network communication that said process might have. I use it like its going […]

Here is one of those tips that will let you do a recursive copy of a directory to another location using tar. By using tar and not cp, it will preserve the PERMISSIONS and OWNERSHIPS of all the files it touches. Simply “cd” to the source location and execute the following command: tar cvf – […]

For me, vi has to be the best text editor out there for Linux. Sure, there are countless other editors like pico, emacs and the like but none with the power that vi offers, in my opinion of course. Admittedly, vi isn’t very user friendly and it has a steep learning curve. It comes pre-installed […]

Ever wanted to be 10000% sure that a file you deleted in Linux was actually deleted? It is said that a file isn’t really deleted from a hard drive in any OS unless you overwrite the exact location it once held in the file system. In Linux, not even the unforgiving rm -rf will permanently […]