tail command
Print the last 10 lines of a file by default.
class="code"$ tail filename.txt
Print N number of lines from the file named filename.txt
$ tail -n N filename.txt
View the content of the file in real time using tail -f. This is useful to view the log files, that keeps growing. The command can be terminated using CTRL-C.
$ tail -f log-file
less command
less is very efficient while viewing huge log files, as it doesn’t need to load the full file while opening.
$ less huge-log-file.log
One you open a file using less command, following two keys are very helpful.
CTRL+F – forward one window
CTRL+B – backward one window
su command
Switch to a different user account using su command. Super user can switch to any other user without entering their password.
$ su - USERNAME
Execute a single command from a different account name. In the following example, john can execute the ls command as raj username. Once the command is executed, it will come back to john’s account.
$ su - raj -c 'ls'
Login to a specified user account, and execute the specified shell instead of the default shell.
$ su -s 'SHELLNAME' USERNAME
mysql command
mysql is probably the most widely used open source database on Linux. Even if you don’t run a mysql database on your server, you might end-up using the mysql command ( client ) to connect to a mysql database running on the remote server.
To connect to a remote mysql database. This will prompt for a password.
$ mysql -u root -p -h 192.168.1.2
To connect to a local mysql database.
$ mysql -u root -p
If you want to specify the mysql root password in the command line itself, enter it immediately after -p (without any space).
yum command
To install apache using yum.
$ yum install httpd
To upgrade apache using yum.
$ yum update httpd
To uninstall/remove apache using yum.
$ yum remove httpd
rpm command
To install apache using rpm.
# rpm -ivh httpd-2.2.3-22.0.1.el5.i386.rpm
To upgrade apache using rpm.
# rpm -uvh httpd-2.2.3-22.0.1.el5.i386.rpm
To uninstall/remove apache using rpm.
# rpm -ev httpd
ping command
Ping a remote host by sending only 5 packets.
$ ping -c 5 gmail.com
date command
Set the system date:
# date -s "01/31/2010 23:59:53"
Once you’ve changed the system date, you should syncronize the hardware clock with the system date as shown below.
# hwclock –systohc
# hwclock --systohc –utc
wget command
The quick and effective method to download software, music, video from internet is using wget command.
$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-3.2.1.tar.gz
Download and store it with a different name.
$ wget -O taglist.zip http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=7701
