Increasing / decreasing number of xargs parallel processes (at run time!)
xargs makes it very easy to quickly run a set of similar processes in parallel – but did you know when you’re half-way through a...
Category: SysAdmin
Posts about system administration.
stdbuf – Run COMMAND, with modified buffering operations for its standard streams
While piping together commands that only output intermittently we run into the pipe buffers created by the pipe() system call (also see overview of pipes...
Disk Usage
To review disk usage recursively – a few different options exist (when scanning manually through with df and du are not enough). I have found...
md (software RAID) and lvm (logical volume management)
md Building a RAID array using mdadm – two primary steps: “mdadm –create” to build the array using available resources “mdadm –detail –scan” to build...
Supporting old Debian distros
For old servers that need to stay that way (for whatever reason) updates are no longer available but you can access the packages that were...
A tale of two burst balances (AWS EC2 and EBS performance)
When using and monitoring AWS for EC2 instances and their attached EBS volumes there are a couple of very important metrics to keep an eye...
Adding tasks to a background screen
A bunch of processes have failed – and you’d like to restart them in a screen session in case you need to rerun them in...
single quote characters in a single-quoted string in shells
A very quick and simple comment on building single-quoted strings in shell scripts which include single quotes. Note that it’s not possible to include a...
LINES and COLUMNS environment magic
Ever wondered why you can read the $LINES and $COLUMNS environment variables from your text shell and have them seemingly aware (or indeed, actually aware)...
XTerm*VT100*selectToClipboard: true
The Problem Working with copying text between applications which use the X11 PRIMARY (eg. the quick-copy of selected text and pasting by clicking the middle...