Unix commands cheat list
This is nothing more than a place for me to jot down all the *nix commands that I have a hard time remembering. It is not a tutorial, and all the information here is to be used at your own risk. The commands here are used for either freeBSD 5.3, OS X 10.3 or both.
1. Flush the DNS cache:
lookupd -flushcache
2. Run CPAN in shell mode:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
3. Start, Stop, Restart Apache:
apachectl start
apachectl stop
apachectl restart
4. Shutdown and reboot:
shutdown -R now
5. Show disk space:
df -k (in Kb)
df -m (in Mb)
df -g (in Gb)
6. Show disk usage:
du -hc
7. Show disk usage one folder deep:
du -hc -d1
8. Show running processes:
ps aux
9. Edit the Apache configurations file (for freeBSD):
pico /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf
10. Edit the Apache configurations file (for OS X):
pico /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf (for Apache 1.3)
11. Run the install utility for freeBSD:
/stand/sysinstall
12. Rebuild the access or virtualusertable databases after editing /etc/mail/access or /etc/mail/virtusertable :
make maps
13. Dump a MySQL database:
mysqldump -u USER -pPASSWORD DBNAME > filename.sql
14. Import from a dump file into MySQL:
mysql -u USER -p DBNAME < filename.sql
15. Grab your most important configuration files and email them to yourself:
tar cvfz - /etc/rc.conf /etc/master.passwd /etc/fstab /usr/local/etc | uuencode seedfiles.tgz | mail -s “Web Server Seed Files” someguy@someserver.com
16. Configure Apache 2 from source with the proper modules:
sudo ./configure --prefix=/apache2 --enable-cgi=yes --enable-cgid=yes --enable-dav=yes --enable-expires=yes --enable-headers=yes --enable-info=yes --enable-rewrite=yes --enable-so=yes --enable-speling=yes --enable-ssl=yes --enable-usertrack=yes --enable-vhost-alias=yes
17. Change the mySQL password:
mysqladmin -u root password 'new password goes here'
18. rsync for dummies:
rsync -r --stats --progress --exclude 'some wildcard' /from/some/folder /to/some/other/folder
19. PHP5 on OS X:
http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/ has a ready to run installer with every possible option turned on. Saves a hell of a lot of hassle.
20. CVS – How to set the CVSROOT in bash:
Put this in .bashrc:
CVSROOT=/usr/local/cvsroot
export CVSROOT
21. CVS – How to set your default editor to pico instead of vi:
EDITOR=pico
export EDITOR
22. CVS – Checkout
(from the folder you want to hold the checked out code)
cvs checkout project
23. CVS – Commit
(from within the working folder)
cvs commit
It will open pico so you can type an explanation of the changes commited.
24. CVS – Refresh working copy
(from within the working folder)
cvs update
I don’t trust this one 100%, so every now and then I re-check out the source.
25. Webmin
A great way to easily manage *nix servers is Webmin. I use it on both freeBSD and it is pretty damn nice. While some of its modules are a bit rustic, overall it beats the hell out of having to use the CLI for annoying stuff.
26. Split a file based on a separation string
csplit -k -f output_file_prefix source_file_name '/separation string/' {99}
99 is the number of times top repeat the command. In the unix flavor of split you can do {*}, but OS X doesn’t like it so I am setting it to 99.
27. Run the Apache Bench:
ab -n100 -c20 http://www.mydomain.com/
Where 100 is the number of iterations and 20 is the number of concurrent hits.
28. Default admin web site for Smoothwall Express:
https://smoothwall.yourdomain.com:441/
29. Recursive find:
find . -iname "*\?*"
finds anything with the escaped character (in this case a question mark) within your current folder.
30. ftp upload from command line:
This one falls under “annoying quirks of OS X.” I wasted over one hour trying to decypher the man page for ftp for 10.4 because it would not let me upload a file from a compressed one-line command within a bash script. Here is the one that worked:
ftp -u ftp://$USER:$PASSWORD@$FTPSERVER/$FTPFOLDER/$REMOTE_FILENAME $LOCAL_FILENAME
This one worked like a champ.