Use ImageMagick to work with images
ImageMagick is a handy multipurpose command-line tool for all your image needs.
How I find and kill rogue programs
As useful and important as Firefox is to my ability to interact with the outside world, create on this website, manage my money, and much...
The dd command — the Disk Destroyer
Yes -- dd -- the disk destroyer. The command that strikes fear into the hearts of SysAdmins everywhere. It did for me, too, until I...
5 Linux commands you should never run (and why)
Sometimes we run into articles on other sites that we wish we'd written. This one on ZDNET is an excellent example. There are some commands...
Searching text files from the command line
The find command is a powerful and flexible tool to locate files under a path.
Heading to the Beach
Tomorrow, Saturday as I write this, we’ll be heading to Atlantic Beach, our current favorite. By then time you read it, we’ll be there enjoying the amazing views including the one in the picture above. We do this every year.
To make my computing life as seamless as possible, I take my laptop. I always sync my home directory from my primary workstation to my laptop, named Voyager3 or vgr3 for short.
Using the screen command for flexibility
You might at first think of “screen” as the device on which your Linux desktop is displayed. That is one meaning. For SysAdmins like us,...
How I send email from the command line
There are times when I find it useful to send email from the command line. I’m not talking about using one of the text mode clients llike Alpine. I mean sending email directly from the command line.
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 05 — Embrace the CLI
Author's note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 6 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes. The Force is...
Check spelling at the command line
Check spelling at the command line like old-school Unix with this cool script.
How to use the base64 command on Linux
The base64 command converts binary data to ASCII data so that it can be transmitted as text. It's a common method of encoding used to...
How to use SSH
You may have heard that Linux and Unix computers give you the ability to control a computer other than the one you're sitting at. That's...
Getting started on the command line
As a SysAdmin, the Linux command line is typically my happy place. The command line interface, the CLI, is the closest I can get to the raw power of my computers. It gives me access to tools that make my work easy, fast, and even fun. I use the command line so much that I sometimes forget how much power I have to manage my computers.
I also forget that it took me a long time to really understand the terminology that applies to the various tools that I use to access that command line. This article is about those tools and the sometimes confusing terminology necessary to function on the CLI.
Mastering the Linux cp Command: A Comprehensive Guide
When I began to use Linux over twenty-five years ago I was not as comfortable on the command line as I am now. I had...
Tips for using the ‘ls’ command in Linux
One of the first commands I learned in Linux was ls. Knowing what’s in a directory where a file on your system resides is important....
Intro to the Linux chgrp and newgrp commands
In a recent article, I introduced the chown command, which is used for modifying ownership of files on systems. Recall that ownership is the combination...
