Get to know your linux-system - Step 1

In this lesson I wanna show you a command, that gives you with just two keystrokes a load of useful information about a linux system.

What you can expect

In this lessen I will talk about

• The one command I always type in at first after logging in into a system.
• The current time and the timezone your system is configured with
• How to find out, if your system is currently overloaded or not
• If there are other users active on the system and what they are doing

(Yes - linux is a multi-user environment. And therefore it’s often very useful to see, what other users are doing on the system at the time you are working there.)

What the heck are they using xargs for?

You know how to connect two tools via stdin and stdout? Great!

• But how about the commands that don’t read from it’s input-datastream?
• How to interconnect commands together, that naturally won’t fit?

This is, where xargs comes into play.

And because I know your time is precious - I’ve created this really short video-training … only 7:32 min :-)

In this video you will also discover …

• the one big philosophy you can expect from most linux-tools

• which commands can be interconnected directly

• and the only two parameters you need for controlling the behavior of xargs most of the time.

So sit back, watch and enjoy …

If your shell always get’s you wrong - quote the right way

Here is another question that often comes up by my students and clients:

” … how can I solve the problem with these special-characters? The shell always gets me wrong …”

The fast and simple answer to this is: You have to quote!

… and you have to to it the right way.

But let’s start from the beginning:

As you know, there are characters at the command line, that simply has special meanings for the shell.

You use them for instance, for referencing the content of a variable (“$”)

robert@demo:~$ echo Hello $NAME

… or for redirecting a datatream to a file (“>”):

robert@demo:~$ ls -l /etc > $TEMPFILE

But everytime you wanna use these special characters without their special meaning for the shell, you have to take special care about it.

(huh - three times “special” in one sentence. this must be really special ;-) )

So instead of writing

robert@demo:~$ echo Buy this book for $9 now
Buy this book for now

you have to write something like

robert@demo:~$ echo 'Buy this book for $9 now'
Buy this book for $9 now

In this way, the shell won’t try to interprete $9 as a variable. Instead it would take the “$”-sign just like what it is: a $-sign.

This mechanism is called “quoting” and technically explained for instance in depth in the Bash-Documentation.

Let me show you, how the quoting works. And your shell never gets you wrong again … ;-)

SSH port-forwarding from within the Google Cloud Shell

Google provides a very useful tool especially for those I’m calling “cloud workers”: the Cloud Shell. This gives you access to a linux-shell for just whatever you do usually in a linux shell - directly from your browser.

From time to time I use the cloud shell as a starting-point to connect via ssh to other systems. Recently I noticed that tcp-port-forwarding via the outgoing ssh-connections doesn’t work out of the box: When trying to establish a port-forwarding (ssh user@targethost -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080) the following error occurs:

bind: Cannot assign requested address

… and the port-forwarding doesn’t work.

The reason for this is simple - as always as you know it: The ssh-client tries to bind to the local ipv6-port. This is not supported in the cloud shell and therefore fails.

How to delete command lines from the bash history

And suddenly it happened again: I’ve typed sensitive information (at this time it was a password) into the command line.

And the shell kindly saved the typed commandline into its history. This way it wants to help me if I need the same command line later again. Great!

But what happens, if the system I’m working on isn’t under my full control? Imagine I’ve worked on a customer system …

Or what if someone later looks over my shoulder while I’m searching through my history?

The sensitive line needs to be removed!

• What’s the best way for doing this?
• How do we protect ourselves from this happening again later?

Generally speaking: You have two options to remove command lines from the bash history: first, by using the history command and second, by editing ~/.bash_history directly.