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In this guide, we will describe what character encoding and cover a few examples of converting files from one character encoding to another using a command line tool. Then finally, we will look at how…

In this article, we will look at how to find a process name by its process identification number (PID). Before we dive into the actual solution, let us briefly talk about how processes are created…

As a newbie, one of the many things you should master in Linux is identification of devices attached to your system. It may be your computer’s hard disk, an external hard drive or removable media…

Let’s say you have a large ISO file on your Linux server and you wanted to access, extract or copy one single file from it. How do you do it? Well in Linux there are…

Let us start by defining a bad sector/block, it’s a section on a disk drive or flash memory that can not be read from or written to anymore, as a result of a fixed physical…

Sometimes you get into a situation where you need to delete all files in a directory or simply cleanup a directory by removing all files except files of a given type (ending with a particular…

The easiest way to count number of files and subdirectories in a directory using a tree command, which is best known for displaying files and directories in tree-like form. Although you can always enable quotas…

When it comes to gaining absolute control over your Linux system, then nothing comes close to the command line interface (CLI). In order to become a Linux power user, one must understand the different types…

If you are in charge of managing a database server, from time to time you may need to run a query and inspect it carefully. While you can do that from the MySQL / MariaDB…

Sometimes you may find it useful to display the access rights of files or directories in octal form instead of rwx or perhaps you want to display both. Instead of using good old ls -l…

As a system administrator or Linux power user, you may have probably come across or even on several occasions, used the versatile Linux Rsync tool, which enables users to expeditiously copy or synchronize files locally…

Some of the special directories that a Linux user is bound to work with so many times on a shell command line include the user’s home directory, the current and previous working directories. Therefore, understanding…

When you have important sensitive data, then its crucial to have an extra layer of security to your files and directories, specially when you need to transmit the data with others over a network. That’s…

As an alternative to cron job scheduler, the at command allows you to schedule a command to run once at a given time without editing a configuration file. The only requirement consists of installing this…

Have you ever typed a command and rushed to hit Enter, only to find that you had a typo in it? While you can use the up and down arrows to navigate the command history…

Similarly to the previous tip about find out top processes by RAM and CPU usage, you can also use top command to view the same information. Perhaps there’s an extra advantage of this approach when…

I remember once reading that efficient system administrators are lazy people. The reason is not that they’re not doing their job or wasting their time – it is mostly because they have automated a good…

Are you worried of transferring or uploading large files over a network, then worry no more, because you can move your files in bits to deal with slow network speeds by splitting them into blocks…

Many times, we are locked in a situation where we have to search for multiple files with different extensions, this has probably happened to several Linux users especially from within the terminal. There are several…

Virtual consoles are very important features of Linux, and they provide a system user a shell prompt to use the system in a non-graphical setup which you can only use on the physical machine but…

Apache web server is probably the most used web server across platforms including different Linux distributions and Windows. The web server is used to deliver web content and can serve many queries at once. It is often…

One of the Linux’s beauties is that you can control almost everything about it. This gives a system administrator a great control over his system and better utilization of the system resources. While some might have…

In Linux, you can change the maximum amount of open files. You may modify this number by using the ulimit command. It grants you the ability to control the resources available for the shell or…

When running a web server that can be accessed from an open or public network such as Internet, then it is always a good System Administration practice to monitor access to your server. Find Top…

A rough utilization of Linux cat command would be to make a full disk backup or a disk partition backup or cloning of a disk partition by redirecting the command output against the partition of…

In Linux (also UNIX) $PATH is environment variable, used to tell the shell where to look for executable files. $PATH variable provides great flexibility and security to the Linux systems and it is definitely safe to…

More is a *nix command line used to display the contents of a file in a console. The basic usage of more command is to run the command against a file as shown below: Read…

Device or system hostnames are used to easily recognize a machine within a network in a human readable format. It is not much of a surprise, but on Linux system, the hostname can be easily…

If you are a Linux system administrator, time will come when you will need to configure networking on your system. Unlike desktop machines where you can use dynamic IP addresses, on a server infrastructure, you…

This article is a part of our Linux Tricks and Tips series, in this article we will cover some basic usage of cat command (most frequently used command in Linux) and tac (reverse of cat…

When we run certain commands in Unix/Linux to read or edit text from a string or file, we most times try to filter output to a given section of interest. This is where using regular…

A system administrator often needs to run a command repeatedly in a certain periods of time. Often such tasks can be easily completed with simple cron commands. In most of the cases  this should work, but…

SSH or Secure Shell in simple terms is a way by which a person can remotely access another user on other system but only in command line i.e. non-GUI mode. In more technical terms, when…