UNIX Hints & Hacks

Chapter 1. Topics in Administration

• 1.1 Collecting System Information

• 1.2 Backup Key Files!

• 1.3 Execution on the Last Day of a Month

• 1.4 Dealing with Unwanted Daemons

• 1.5 Keep Those Daemons Running

• 1.6 fuser Instead of ps

• 1.7 Swap on-the-Fly

• 1.8 Keep It Up with nohup

• 1.9 Redirecting Output to null

• 1.10 Keeping Remote Users Out

• 1.11 Rewinding Tapes Fast

• 1.12 Generating a Range of Numbers

• 1.13 Remove the ---- Dashes ----

• 1.14 Echo Does ls

• 1.15 Building Large Dummy Files

• 1.16 Burning-in Disk Drives

• 1.17 Bringing a System Down

UNIX administrators are faced with many tasks during normal, day-to-day operations. This first chapter deals with some of the tasks that most UNIX administrators wish had some simple solutions.