Tag: sysadmin

Essential bash utilities for Ubuntu newcomers, file management, text processing, process control, and the commands you'll type every day.

Find your Linux distro version, kernel version, and architecture with uname, lsb_release, /etc/os-release, and hostnamectl.

Fix 'Argument list too long' in bash when cp or rsync chokes on thousands of files, glob loops, find + xargs, and the ARG_MAX reason behind it.

Your disk is full and du is lying to you. ncdu, df, and find tricks to track down space hogs before your server goes down at 2 AM.

Out of RAM and no time to reimage? Add swap via a file on any partition using mkswap, swapon, and fstab, done in under 5 minutes.

Repair and optimize all MySQL databases at once with mysqlcheck, a one-liner that runs on every table without logging into MySQL.

Old kernels fill /boot until apt upgrades fail. Clear them with apt autoremove or dpkg purge on Ubuntu and Debian, plus the Proxmox quirk and how many to keep.

Master MySQL from the command line: connect, query databases, manage users, repair tables, optimize, everything you keep Googling, one reference.

logrotate keeps your /var/log from eating the disk, configure rotation schedules, compression, and retention for any service log.

Generate SSH keys, set up passwordless auth, configure SSH, and transfer files securely with SCP, the foundation of headless Linux work.

Empty directories pile up after file migrations. Prune them with find and rmdir, dry-run first, use find -delete, and handle hidden dirs without surprises.

Count files in a directory (recursively or not) with find, ls, and tree, quick one-liners for when du just isn't telling you enough.