In the GNOME desktop, there is no obvious way to tell which version you’re running by way of the GUI. Instead, we need to consult the command line and try out a couple of commands to find out more. Here’s how. Let’s open a Terminal session and do some hacking. GNOME 2.x If you’re running … Read more
Bulk renaming files can be done with the rename command. It shares many similarities with cp and mv, but its simplicity can be so staggering that its difficult to figure out how to use it. If we just type “rename” at the command prompt, all we get is the message rename call: rename from to … Read more
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
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
We can access parameters passed via the command line in our PHP shell scripts. Those are stored as an array in the variable $argv. Consider this: #!/usr/bin/php
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
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.
The other day I tried to format a USB drive for use with Windows. I had previously tried this on my Mac to no avail. But now even Windows was telling me that it too could not format my drive. I was stumped! I had in fact never seen anything like it before. Was that … Read more
