Tag: Command Line
Using Help to Supplement Man Pages
Man pages are an invaluable tool in the Unix eco-system. Providing both a starting overview and a deep-dive future reference, what you need to know about a command is only a $ man <command> away. But there are times when the man command doesn’t provide all the information needed. Many of the most common Unix [...]
Referencing Last Argument in Bash using Special Parameters
Bash contains a number of powerful special parameters that can be used on both the command line and inside scripts. My most used of the bunch is $_, which references the last argument of the preceding command. To illustrate the power of this, take the example of creating a new directory and cd’ing into it. [...]
GRUB Boot Loader Command Line
Now that I’m back to dual booting on one of my boxes, I’ve been paying more attention to the GRUB boot loader. Up until now my eyes have only read, but not registered, the bit about opening a command line. When I did finally load it, what I found was an a surprisingly deep and [...]
Preserving a Copy in Linux with Tar
Ah, $ mv and $ cp how venerable they are. But there are times when a bit more is needed, namely when an exact copy (with hidden files, permissions, etc all preserved) is required. In that case tar is ready to step in: tar cf – . | (cd /newdir ; tar xf -) It’s [...]
Using Redis-cli with multiple local instances
The more I read about Redis the more my mind starts to fill with potential use cases. A blazingly fast in-memory key-value database with support for basic data-structures, Redis is worth getting excited about. Recently I’ve been testing it for a variety of caching and logging scenarios. While Redis does support multiple databases on one [...]