Unix as a Second Language

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Sandra Henry-Stocker has been administering Unix systems for more than 18 years. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) but remembers enough English to write books and buy groceries. She currently works for TeleCommunication Systems, a wireless communications company, in Annapolis, Maryland, where no one else necessarily shares any of her opinions. She lives on a small farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore. This blog offers advice for every-day Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems. Send comments and suggestions to mailto:bugfarm@gmail.com.

by Sandra Henry-Stocker

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Sandra Henry-Stocker has been administering Unix systems for more than 18 years. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) but remembers enough English to write books and buy groceries. She currently works for TeleCommunication Systems, a wireless communications company, in Annapolis, Maryland, where no one else necessarily shares any of her opinions. She lives with her second family on a small farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Send comments and suggestions to bugfarm@gmail.com.

Why I Love Unix

Posted Oct 27, 2010 - 07:48 am

Sandra Henry-Stocker's long-standing and largely happy relationship with Unix has been an interesting and rewarding trek. If she hasn't helped you to love Unix, let her try just once more.
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- Operating Systems, career, loving unix
Checking Your arp Entries

Posted Oct 20, 2010 - 03:45 pm

you to display the IP address to hardware (MAC) address mappings that a system has built so that it doesn't have to fetch the same information repeatedly for systems it communicates with.
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- IT Management/Strategy, arp -a, arp cache
Unix How-To: Checking on Collisions

Posted Oct 13, 2010 - 04:04 pm

One metric that helps gauge how well your network is holding up to the strain of busy users and applications is the number of packets that slam into other packets, generating what is called a "collision". Let's check out an easy tool for calculating the collision rate for a particular network interface.
Unix How-To: Nifty One-Liners

Posted Oct 06, 2010 - 11:27 am

Today's collection of one-liners are sure to win some converts. There's nothing like a quick command that saves you a lot of trouble and just might impress your boss and coworkers that you're the cleverest person around.
Unix How-To: More Alias Quickies to Save You Time

Posted Sep 29, 2010 - 02:50 pm

Today's column is a grab bag of useful aliases that will save you some precious typing time. The sysadmins I know like to type as few characters as possible, so many of these are especially terse
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- IT Management/Strategy, aliases, bash
Unix How-To: Making Better Use of Find

Posted Sep 22, 2010 - 03:58 pm

Find is not just useful for locating files, but also for doing things with the files once it finds them. You can find files based on numerous criteria -- their names, their owners, their size, etc. -- and you can then perform some operation on the files from simply listing them to changing permissions or analyzing their contents. You can also make the operation that you specify to occur only if you confirm that you want it to happen after you are prompted. Let's see how this works.
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- Operating Systems, Exec, find command
Unix How-To: Counting Anything

Posted Sep 15, 2010 - 10:23 am

A reader recently asked whether it was possible on Unix systems to count how many times a particular character appears on each line of text. "On Unix", I answered, "not only is just about anything possible, but there are usually half a dozen ways to do it".
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- Operating Systems, awk, count characters
Unix How-To: Quotes to Live By

Posted Sep 09, 2010 - 10:10 am

One of the things that really throws new Unix users is when to use quotes and which kind of quotes. Between single quotes, double quotes and back ticks, a person can start to feel that Unix is unnecessarily tricky.
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- Operating Systems, back ticks, double quotes
Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckyorn

Posted Sep 01, 2010 - 07:11 am

In last week's column, we looked at ckrange, a Solaris tool for validating numeric responses in scripts. A related command, ckyorn (for "check yes or no"), ensures that a user responds with some version of yes or no. With similar behavior to ckrange, ckyorn has the same advantages of simplifying your code so that you don't have to check whether a user has entered y, Y, Yes, yes, n, N, No, no or even YeS or nO.
Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckrange

Posted Aug 25, 2010 - 10:53 am

One of the all too common coding mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities is the failure to validate all entered data for accuracy. A defensive developer will consider all input to be evil until proven otherwise. Anyone writing scripts on Solaris has a leg up when it comes to input validation -- the versatile and wonderfully handy ckrange command.
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- Development, ckrange command, prompt

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