Category: Systems

All systems related posts

A non-printing character is a character which won’t actually get directly printed (or displayed) but rather interpreted. Such non-printing characters are for example line-feed or tabulation. The interpretation of those characters can differ from one system to the next. For example the line-feed character is different on Unix or DOS.

If you need an easy way to confirm that a text file is DOS or UNIX formatted (they differ with respect to the end of line character(s) for example) or if you wish to display normally non-printing characters of a text file, you can use the -vET command line switches of the cat utility.

As explained in the man page :

• -v : will use the ^ and M- notation for control and multibytes characters
• -E : will make ends of lines visible
• -T : will make tabulations visible

For example : read this entry »

This post is meant to clarify a few key concepts about Unix filesystems such as directory permissions, hardlinks and symlinks.

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In this post I’ll revisit the classical “how to remap caps lock into something useful” once again. In this post, I’ll show how to remap the caps lock key to have an extra Escape key, which is very useful for all VI/Vim users.

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One of the features of bash I’ve too long overlooked is its history expansion. In this post I’ll show a few examples to get a grip at it.
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If you’re looking for CPU usage statistics and system performance on IBM AIX, sar might just be the tool your looking for. It’ll display information for 5 minutes intervals from midnight to current time. The output looks like this :
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When working as a systems administrator, you’ll always end up having to solve a file system full error in a hurry. Here are a few commands and hints to help you get out of it quickly on a UNIX like system.
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If there’s a file installed on your disk for which you’d like to know what package provided it, you can use the equery command like below :
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If you’ve got a VirtualBox VM already installed and you wish to clone/copy it, follow the steps below :
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If you need to export ZFS volumes through CIFS, follow this simple step by step procedure.
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In OpenSolaris, switching to the /dev development branch is a bit like switching to the testing branch for some linux distros. So you might want to think twice before doing so, as it might sometimes break things.

If you still want to do that, follow those instructions :
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