Author Archives: dannSWashko

The vmstat program is a tool for displaying information about virtual memory usage and is part of the procps suite of utilities. The procps package provides tools for browsing the /proc file system. The /proc filesystem is “psuedo” file system … Continue reading →

The Apache BenchMark tool is a handy application to have in your toolbox that can perform a number of helpful tasks. First, the primary use for the tool is to simulate how your server may react under maximum load. Because … Continue reading →

Back in episode 7 the chown command and UNIX file permissions were discussed. This episode is going to extend that and talk about file system attributes, or more appropriately named extended attributes. Recall that Linux file systems support three permission … Continue reading →

The last two episodes of Linux in the Shell discussed the use of bc as a command line scientific calculator and units for converting between different units. This episode will continue along the lines of mathematics by highlighting some other … Continue reading →

Last episode of Linux in the Shell discussed the use of the bc command to perform math on the command line. This episode continues in suit with a mathematical theme picking up from the last examples of converting between different … Continue reading →

Math from the Linux command line is one of those tasks that is not as straight forward as you may think. There are many tools that will allow you to perform mathematical functions accessible to you, but to perform simple arithmetic is … Continue reading →

The time program is a handy tool to not only guage how much time in seconds it takes a program to run, but will also display how much user CPU time and system CPU time was used to execute the … Continue reading →

The date command will not only display or let you change the current date and time but is the go to utility for getting date and time information into scripts. Evoked by itself the date command will output the current … Continue reading →

The sort command does just that, it sorts input.  Input can be a list of files, standard in, or files with standard in. The first example presents this simple file, shopping.txt,  containing a list of items: chicken fish sour cream … Continue reading →

The previous two shows have discussed different ways to kill a process using kill and pkill. This episode will cover a third command, killall. The killall command is used to send a signal to every process that is running the … Continue reading →