LornaJane

Top Tips from Linux-Fu

Tuesday, June 2. 2009

I have recently been giving a talk entitled "Linux-Fu for PHP Developers" (slides are here) and although it includes some really basic commands, even some quite experienced people have thanked me for particular bits that they picked up. I'm considering dropping some of the sections from this talk so here are the things people most tell me they learned:

cd -


If you pass a single minus as the argument to cd, you will change back into the directory you just came from. Ideal for those switching-between-two-deep-links situations.

pushd and popd


I didn't include these in my talk formally but I mentioned them almost every time I gave it (or one of the attendees did!). I don't actually use these commands, but they are like an extension to "cd -" - you can build up stacks of directories and then jump around between them. They sound pretty handy so do take a look.

ls -lrt


I got a lot of negative comments for including "cd" and "ls" in my talks - but I had quite a few people say that the -t (to sort by time) and the -r (to reserve the sort) switches were new to . I use these together for viewing which files are new in a directory, great for logfiles or upload directories.

Hope these are helpful to someone, let me know if you use these or have others you'd like to share!

Posted by LornaJane in tech at 11:36 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
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I’ve been using "cd $OLDPWD" for years now, without knowing "cd -" existed. Very easy to get into habits like this, even though there may be something simpler others take for granted. Thanks for the time-saving tip.

#1 Bashir Ellis on 2009-06-05 22:53 (Reply)

I guess that’s the secret sauce of linux. There is something new to learn for everyone, always, no matter how long you’ve been working with it.

Personal fav. of mine.

find ./ -name *.torrent -exec rm {} \;

Because, umm, you know, those files just seem to pile up for some reason. Al those darn linux iso torrents.

#2 Erik Snoeijs (Homepage) on 2009-06-05 23:51 (Reply)

Bashir: I often learn something when looking over the shoulder of another developer, the talk was an attempt to scale that experience to a conference audience – glad you picked up something new :)

Erik: I’m just starting to pick up these favourite commands that I run all the time, I’m blogging most of them though for reference (and so I can’t lose/forget them)

#3 LornaJane (Homepage) on 2009-06-06 18:51 (Reply)

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Tyrone about PHP5 Soap Server
Thu, 02.09.2010 14:14
Hi Lorna Jane, Thanks for all this – the info on PHP and Soap on the Net is a total mess. Some choosing to to use nusoap.php – which now doesnt even exist anymore. Great work using this method I was up and running very quickly. However – this method only shows a call passing one paramet [...]
LornaJane about Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP
Wed, 01.09.2010 13:03
Thanks so much to everyone that has dropped in and said that this tip is working for them – I had to refer back to this myself the other day to remind me how to get around the FTP prompt!
sherra about Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP
Fri, 27.08.2010 04:17
great insight. thank you. I moved my blog and forgot what I needed to do to avoid ftp. your suggestion works like a charm.
Carl Nobile about Logrotate Error on Ubuntu
Fri, 27.08.2010 00:16
This issue seems to happen when you move a DB from one machine to another as I did. The procedure you describe above should be put into MySQL documentation. You should put in a bug report to the MySQL people as their documentation needs to updated. And yes the PASSWORD parameter needs to be re [...]
Rudger Gravestein about One-Step Symlink Switch
Mon, 23.08.2010 09:19
i also move the current, so in case of non working result, i can easily move it back. mv -fT current fallback; mv -fT next current;
Anon about One-Step Symlink Switch
Sun, 22.08.2010 19:43
This is a convenient way to upgrade, and is certainly a good thing for development / testing environments. On a busy site there might be a slim risk this technique could be problematic. Although the file system is updated in an atomic transaction, a web browser could still read from both the [...]
Les about Working with Web Services - Froscon 2010
Sun, 22.08.2010 17:35
Once more you shine girl yer its true you’re a PHP babe :D
Edmar about One-Step Symlink Switch
Sat, 21.08.2010 20:17
Nice to see a post about this. :-) 100% of our deploys are done using symlinks. We copy our releases into revision-specific folders (which are rev123, rev124, etc.). Deploy is done using: cd /software-revisions-folder ln -sf rev124 current To revert: ln -sf rev123 current Thi [...]
Deep C about One-Step Symlink Switch
Fri, 20.08.2010 19:09
This is very interesting and helpful tip. I just felt its quite similar to adding a new node to link list in C and moving pointer to next :)