This work by Stephane KATTOOR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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.
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 :
read this entry »
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.
read this entry »
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 :
read this entry »
There is a feature in OpenSSH since v3.9 which allows multiple SSH connections with the same caracteristics (host, port, remote login) to be made through a single TCP connection. This is useful because you’ll have to authenticate only once, and besides the new SSH connections will be much faster to establish.
read this entry »
This post is a step by step explanation about how to get an OpenSolaris 2008.11 run as a Xen DomU on a Linux Dom0.
To follow this, you’ll need a Linux machine ready for Xen (I run Xen 3.3.0), with vncviewer installed.
This post doesn’t explain the basics of Xen, so you might want to start by learning Xen if you don’t already know a bit of it.
If you need to identify broken symlinks, you can do the following :
find -L . -type l
The -L options instructs find to follow symlinks when possible. Hence no “working symlink” will ever get returned as the targets won’t match -type l (meaning “file is a symlink”).
On the other hand, find will not be able to follow broken symlinks, so the information will be taken from the symlink itself and not from the non-existent or otherwise unreachable target. The -type l will then be a match and the broken symlink filename will be returned.
Case solved 
Thanks to the “Ferg’s Gaff” blog (especially the comments) for showing the way !
In this post I’ll cover the basics one needs to know to install, upgrade and remove packages on a Gentoo linux system. read this entry »
I’ve recently switched to the Gentoo Linux distribution (mostly to experiment with this Linux distro) and I don’t regret it so far. This post is about my first impressions about Gentoo.
