April 9th, 2009 — Linux
Hi everyone, I'm finally back from my holidays, and simply cannot wait to share some more Unix tips with all of you!
Today I'll talk a bit more about yet another way of learning version information about your Linux OS: the /proc/version file. I mentioned it briefly in one of the previous posts, but would like to finish the explanations.
What you can learn from /proc/version
This file will not show you the name of the actual OS release, but will instead give you specifics about the version of Linux kernel used in your distribution, and confirm the version of a GCC compiler used to build it.
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March 18th, 2009 — News
Hi all, and thanks for a great interest in the Unix Tutorial membership!
A warm welcome to all the new members!
In just 2 days, more than 50 of you have joined, so I'm confident we'll have great time sharing Unix knowledge in the next few months.
I've got the first few modules of material posted already – they're really simple but that's the whole idea as I target beginners of all levels with my introductory course. I'll be posting more modules in the coming days, and there's already a curriculum posted on forums for people to discuss.
Only 3 more days of free UnixTutorial membership
Unfortunately, I'm also seeing a lot of interest from spammers – because the membership is free, no credit card or Paypal transactions are involved, and this means anyone can register and start spamming the protected forums.
Given the above situation, and also because I'm going away for a few weeks rather soon, I have just decided to close the first wave of enrollments earlier than originally planned: Unix Tutorial enrollment will be closed down this Friday, midnight GMT.
If you know someone who's eager to get started with Unix, please tell them about Unix Tutorial membership so that they can get onboard before the enrollment is over. I'm looking for genuinely interested people prepared to commit some of their time, so if it's just about someone hoping to get a placeholder for accessing premium content in the future – please refrain from signing up at this time.
That's it for the moment! Thanks again for your interest, I'll do my best to make sure you learn plenty of new Unix tricks and gain immediately applicable knowledge from the Unix Tutorial members section.
See also:
March 16th, 2009 — News
Finally, the first enrollment period is open for the Unix Tutorial membership! I plan to have registration open for 3 weeks, after which it will be closed for a few months so that I can work with the first group of members and take all their feedback as we learn Unix basics together.
Become a lifetime Unix Tutorial member!
If you think you know enough about Unix Tutorial membership, then wait no more and proceed straight to the Unix Tutorial Sign Up page. For everyone else, there's a bit more information below.
Why I'm setting up a members area
As you've probably seen, I'm trying to encourage as many people as possible to start using Unix-like operating systems. So far, I've been doing this by sharing tips and how-to guides on various Unix challenges I've come across in my 10+ years of system administration. While this had proved to be very popular, I would like to take it all one step further by publishing a few courses on various Unix topics.
Structure makes learning much easier, and I hope to involve even more people by providing a thorough learning plan for each level of Unix learners: beginners, intermediate users and advanced users which plan to use or manage Unix professionally.
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March 6th, 2009 — Questions & Answers
Today, I'd like to answer one of the oldest questions I have in my incoming UnixTutorial questions email folder. Please leave comments if you need any more help with researching Unix groups on your system.
March 2nd, 2009 — News
First Unix Tutorial enrollments are only 2 weeks away
I will have the first three modules of the Unix Foundations course ready in the next few weeks, and plan to open the Unix Tutorial Members area in exactly 2 weeks, on March 16th, 2009.
You can now join the Unix Tutorial waiting list to make sure you get an email when I open the registration.
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February 26th, 2009 — Advanced topics, Solaris
I've just spent a good few hours trying to find any clues to the problem I was getting. du command would fail with a mysterious "fts_read" error, and there didn't seem to be any good answers on the net with explanations why. I figured someday this post will be found and might save someone a lot of time. It's a lengthy post and I believe the first one on this blog to be truly "advanced" in a technical sense.
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February 25th, 2009 — Basic stuff, Scripts, Unix
If you're ever thought of summing up more than two numbers in shell script, perhaps this basic post will be a good start for your Unix scripting experiments.
Basic construction for summing up in shell scripts
In my Basic arithmetic operations in Unix shell post last year, I've shown you how to sum up two numbers:
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February 18th, 2009 — Questions & Answers
Greetings everyone, today's post is going to be a bit different from the usual technical tips and tricks I share. This time around, I need a bit of help myself – and I hope many of you will be able to answer my questions. Bear with me: it's a lengthy post, but any help is GREATLY APPRECIATED!
Why am I asking these questions?
As you remember, a month ago I have offered invited all of the Unix Tutorial readers to learn Unix together. Everyone benefits from this – you get a chance to ask the questions which you always wanted answered, and I get to refresh my mind or even conduct a research on new topics just so that I can share the answers and solutions in the easiest to follow form.
I'm currently working on a members area for Unix Tutorial, which will eventually have a number of self-paced courses to help you improve your knowledge of Unix and get to the next level of productivity when solving technical problems.
Update: if you're interested in becoming a member, subscribe to the Unix Tutorial waiting list!
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February 18th, 2009 — Perl, Unix
Today I was working on a script, and one of the subroutines needed simple seconds-based arithmetics with time. As you probably remember from my date and time in Unix scripts article, the easiest way to approach this task is to deal with the raw representation of date and time in Unix – the Unix epoch times. This post will show you how to convert standard dates into Unix epoch times in Perl.
February 13th, 2009 — Basic stuff, Linux
Hi all, today I'm going to teach you not one, but two really cool things in one post! First, I'll introduce you to advanced memory usage stats available on Linux systems through /proc/meminfo file, and then I'll explain the basics of using the watch command.
Memory usage with /proc/meminfo
As you know, quite a few Unix-like systems use the so-called pseudo file systems like /proc. It's not a real filesystem, but just a convenient representation of processes managed by your Unix OS. In Linux systems, this directory also contains quite a few files allowing you to access various information about your system. /proc/meminfo is one of such files, it gives you access to most of the memory usage stats.
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