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Favorite Unix Commands

clippy.in

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Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#121
post #111
post #62

It took me a moment to figure out what was going on there (with the whole clippy thing). The bulk of this list is the top commands from commandlinefu which has been on HN before [0], [1]. You can even go meta and install a command to let you search commandlinefu [2]. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527486 [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843373 [2] http://samirahmed.github.com/fu/

I have a suspicion that it's actually a kind of targeted example-advertisement for the clippy thingo ;) and did somewhat work for me actually, I do now feel interested in learning more about the site

On my mobile device, it was nearly unusable...

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#122
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the purpose of this?

Very useful, if you want to make a checkpoint (possibly for /), break things and then get back to the original state. If you'd do that for / , your own system would start behaving, like a system booted from LiveCD. And, after reboot, would return to the origanal state. Overlayfs is pretty cool actually. Allows you to overlay a lower directory with some other upper directory and mount the result somewhere. All the cha…

Awesome! I didn't know what overlayfs was, but recently saw it while playing with OpenWRT. Thanks for sharing :)

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#123
Many years ago, before I ever used Linux in any serious fashion, I often used a password that ended with '!!'. One day I was playing around with setting up MySQL and was having a very hard time with something that seemed super simple. I don't remember exactly how I figured it out, I think I accidentally type my password at the wrong time in the command line and observed some odd behavior and, after hours, finally tracked it to the '!!' command. I decided to try a different root password for MySQL and it was smooth sailing from there. A few months later I was transferring a domain away from a small DNS hosting provider. After a week or so of waiting support told me they were having a hard time with my account and couldn't do what they needed to do to initiate the transfer. I don't have the support emails, must have been my old hotmail account, but something they said suggested they might be trying to run commands on my account with my password (I knew they stored it in plain text since it was in several emails from them and I knew they were Linux servers) and it reminded me about the '!!' issue I had with MySQL. I changed my password and they were able to move forward. I wish I had dug deeper into the issues at the time they occurred.

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#124
post #88

Alt Sys Rq o - useful if you need to shut down a system and your kvm is not working. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

It's probably a good idea to tErminate, kIll, Sync, and remoUnt-ro before hitting Off or reBoot.

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#126
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think typing one more command "sudo !!" is much easier and straight-forward than doing 1. Ctrl+p. Go to the previous line in bash history. 2. Ctrl+a. Go to the beginning of the new line. 3. Type "sudo ". While you're typing your whole commandline shifts around as well. The latter mixes history commands, navigation commands and also modifies a previous command instead of just typing a new 7-letter comman…

You know writing out their function does not make them longer. ;) I agree with the parent because my left pinky is always on capsLock (my ctrl; I swapped caps with ctrl) so a ctrol ap is far easier than to go to shift + 1 twice(to type !). Again, this can be different in other keyboards/setups.

I just wanted to illustrate the increased complexity and different domains of the commands.

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#128

I like those un- commands for easier archive extracting, e.g.: alias unbz2='tar xvjf' alias untar='tar xvfz'

I use atool (http://www.nongnu.org/atool/), which is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu (and I am sure in other distributions as well). It supports all the formats I have encountered so far (tar, tar.gz, zip, rar, bz2 and others).

It provides a few commands, two of which I use the most:

    als - list files in an archive
    aunpack - exatract files from an archive
The best part is aunpack extracts files into a subdirectory (I hate polluting the current directory with files from a new archive which wasn't properly packaged to include a directory), and it does it only when necessary. Before I found it, I always used to create a temp directory, cd to it, unpack into it, and possibly move files around etc.

Re: Favorite Unix Commands

#130
post #67

Single user mode on an HPUX machine was, I think, the most useful to me. ( http://www.unixhub.com/docs/hpux/hpux_boot.html ) I wish I still had that machine, but I do not.

I love playing with OSes and HPUX was one of the ones I didn't get to play with (not to mention Irix and AIX).
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