Every current disk includes a built-in monitoring feature known as SMART that keeps track of faults. On Linux, there is a software package called smartmontools that may be used to query the SMART status of the disk to see if it will fail soon. Installation apt-get install smartmontools Usage First we need to know the ... Read more
Even though a file is held by root and has 700 rights, if the root user saves it in another user's home directory or any other directory owned by another user, that user can remove the file. Example: root@workstation:/home/otheruser# ls -la total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 otheruser otheruser 4096 Jul 28 11:52 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root ... Read more
We're all familiar with Linux's command-line interface (CLI), which allows you to execute nearly any job you can think of by just typing commands into it. This is why we have such a lengthy list of commands for the various versions of Linux. We'll go through the various techniques for showing all of the commands, ... Read more
The shell setting in /etc/passwd determines whether a Linux system user may log in via the shell or over SSH. If you don't want a certain user to be able to log in, set the shell to /bin/false or /sbin/nologin. For the user "otheruser" on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, here's an example: usermod -s /bin/false ... Read more
Have you ever looked in the apache config files to see where a website's virtual host is defined? The apache2ctl script has a useful option that could come in good here. When you execute the command, it should look like this: apache2ctl -S You'll obtain a list of all virtual hosts and default servers in ... Read more
The gunzip command is a widely used command for uncompressing files which are made using the gzip utility. It decompresses files with the.gz or .tgz file extension. The command removes the compressed file. After decompression, the files retain their original extension. Gzip is a popular file compression algorithm that keeps the file’s original mode, ownership, ... Read more
The apt is the most powerful command-line utility for managing the packages such as installing packages, updating package info, upgrading packages as well as Linux kernel, and removing unused packages in the Linux Debian family. The apt command is a CLI package managing tool that is a combination of apt-get and apt-cache which is more ... Read more
Sometimes you require a certain file from a Debian .deb package. For example, because you accidentally deleted a file. Or because the package's installation is faulty and it can't be restored without first adding the missing file. This FAQ explains how to extract the contents of a.deb file downloaded from the Debian or Ubuntu repository. ... Read more
When working with the Linux command line, there are situations where you need to type large paths. Even if you use the bash shell's autocomplete feature, this is a time-consuming process. But do you know that there are times when you can get away with entering a path only once (even if it has to ... Read more
If you have a directory with many files (a few thousand in my case) and need to know which one is the newest, then the following command might be useful. It returns the name and details of the newest file in a directory where it is executed: ls -tl | sed -n 2p