Posts Tagged ‘ Linux ’

List the status of all swap areas. # swap -l swapfile dev swaplo blocks free dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 32,9 16 8425712 8425712 The output has five columns: path The path name for the swap area. dev The major/minor device number...
Read more »

If you need to find out which file in a directory contains a specific word then the grep command is your friend. Here is an example, if you wanted to find out which file in the directory /home contains the word groundhog. grep –i “groundhog” /home/* /home/shadow:Today is groundhog day The –i option means grep will ignore upper/lower...
Read more »

I needed to determine the amount of time it would take to archive large amount of data on my unix server. If I had infinite amount of free time I could sit in front of the screen with a stop watch. But the better way is to create a script that would...
Read more »

My fat fingers inadvertently created a directory on my unix server with special characters. I could not access this directory nor could I delete it. When I listed the directory using the command ls –b, I could see all the funny characters. ls –b scritps010/010/010/010 I tried every command I could think of, rmdir “scripts”,...
Read more »

The root drive on my Solaris server was full and I needed to find out what file was the largest. The du command can list the size of the files in a directory, you can then use the sort command to display the results in numerical order (by size). Below is an example of the...
Read more »

I just installed Solaris 10 on a new SPARC server, now I need to migrate the userids and groups over. The optimal way to migrate the userids while retaining their password is to simply copy three files from the Solaris 9 server over to the new Solaris 10. The three files are...
Read more »

I got this strange error message when launching the vi text editor during the installation of Solaris 10, I don’t know what kind of terminal you are on – all I have is ‘unknown’. The reason for this is becasue the terminal emulation has not been defined in your environment. To configure the terminal...
Read more »

I just installed and configure a new Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 server. It seems that when I telnet to the sever from a remote computer it takes a while to connect and get a login prompt. Once I am able to login in, speed is not an issue. After some research I figured...
Read more »

I built this Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server in VMware a while ago and forgot the root password. I can log in as a user but it does not have the privileges to change the root IDs password. Well, fear not you can reboot the server into single user mode and...
Read more »

As a server administrator I seldom have to check to see if a file exists in the directory. But what if you have a long list of files that you need to check for? Checking for the existence of many many files manually could prove to be tedious and repetitive task. It...
Read more »