How to exit VI with or without saving

Although many alternatives exist, I like using vi for all my command line editing needs. To save changes, I usually use SHIFT + Z + Z, exiting vi under most circumstances. But sometimes, this trick doesn’t work because of write permission problems. In such cases, vi doesn’t close with the above command. Instead, we must … Read more

How to read command line parameters in BASH Scripts

Shell Scripts (BASH Scripts) can access command line parameters using the the variables $1, $2, $2 and so forth, up to $9. In fact, more parameters can be accessed by using curly brackets, like ${10}, ${187} and so forth. Here’s an example: #!/bin/bash if [[ $1 == “x” ]]; then echo “Statement is true” else … Read more

How to extract files from a bz2 archive in Linux

If you’ve ever tried to decompress a file that ends in tar.bz2 using the tar command with the standard -x option, you’ll have noticed that it doesn’t work. That’s because some versions of tar don’t understand the bzip2 codec used in these archives. However, you can tell tar to use this option by specifying the … Read more

How to remove duplicate packages with yum

I’m working on a handful of servers that all have the same problem: when running yum, an error message appears that tells me a package called ntpupdate needs to be upgraded, but somehow this doesn’t work and the package is being skipped. Then follows a huge list of duplicate packages that are installed on those systems (probably installed by the automatic package updater within Plesk).

Let’s see how we can fix such issues.

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