Unix as a Second Language

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Sandra Henry-Stocker has been administering Unix systems for more than 25 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 company that builds innovative technologies to make critical connections happen -- where no one else necessarily shares any of her opinions. This blog offers advice for everyday 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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  • Unix How-To: Checking on Collisions

    Posted Oct 13, 2010 - 05:04 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 - 12:27 pm

    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 - 03:50 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

  • Unix How-To: Making Better Use of Find

    Posted Sep 22, 2010 - 04:58 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.

  • Unix How-To: Counting Anything

    Posted Sep 15, 2010 - 11:23 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".

  • Unix How-To: Quotes to Live By

    Posted Sep 09, 2010 - 11:10 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.

  • Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckyorn

    Posted Sep 01, 2010 - 08:11 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 - 11:53 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.

  • Unix How-To: Sudo without Passwords

    Posted Aug 18, 2010 - 05:39 pm

    How do you allow a particular user to run a particular command via sudo without having to enter a password? And why might you want to do this?

  • Unix Tip: Avoiding the Oops

    Posted Aug 11, 2010 - 07:32 pm

    Ever type "rm -rf dirname" and then realize you've just blown away the wrong directory? You can always alias the rm command to "rm -i", but let's look at a way that you can selectively determine which directories get that special "Are you sure you want to do that" treatment and which get quietly blown away.
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