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: Linux
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...
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...
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)...
Useful Commands
A list of commands / references I’ve found useful. Also see my old wiki page. stdbuf – Run COMMAND, with modified buffering operations for its...