Posts Tagged ‘ Unix ’

How to list the status of swap in Solaris

February 26, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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...
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Using grep/egrep to find out which file contains a word or string in Unix or Linux

February 2, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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...
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Success, failure of the tar command recorded with time and date stamp

January 27, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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...
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How to delete a file or directory with special characters using the inode in Unix or Linux

January 22, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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”,...
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How to change the hostname in Solaris 10

January 21, 2010
By Andrew Lin

To change the hostname in Solaris 10 you need to edit 3 files and appply the new name. /etc/nodename /etc/hostname.*interface, e.g. hostname.bge0 /etc/inet/hosts this file is a hard link to /etc/inet/ipnodes. You will need to make /etc/inet/ipnodes writable before editing it. To enable write use the command chmod 744 /etc/inet/ipnodes. Finally rename directory /var/crash, the system...
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How to determine the AIX OS level and Maintenance Level.

January 20, 2010
By Andrew Lin

IBM had renamed the term maintenance level (ML) to technology level (TL). Here is an excerpt from IBM, “Although some systems administrators still use the term “maintenance level” when discussing their AIX version, the term is now reserved for legacy AIX systems. The new IBM methodology dictates two TL releases per year. The first TL...
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List files by size in reverse numerical order in Linux or Unix.

January 7, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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...
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How to migrate users and groups from Solaris 9 to 10?

January 4, 2010
By Andrew Lin

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...
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Strange message when launching the vi editor.

December 21, 2009
By Andrew Lin

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...
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Managing the services in Solaris.

December 15, 2009
By Andrew Lin

The svcs command will report the status of servics in Solaris. The svcadm command is used for service management such as starting, stopping and restoring services. To display all services with their state information, use the svcs command with the -a option. root@server1 # svcs -a STATE STIME ...
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