Unix : the “script” command

The script command is a must for any unix sysadmin.

Once invoked, it will faithfully write anything you typed as well as any output generated in your terminal into a file of your choice (defaults to “typescript”).

This is great when you want to document everything you did on a specific server, for example.
spaghetti:~$ script
Script started, file is typescript
spaghetti:~$

When launched, you don’t see anything, but everything displayed goes to a file as well as the terminal.

As usual see the man page for details (like appending instead of creating a new file, launching another command instead of your default shell, and so on)

Solaris 10: On which CD is that XYZ package ?

If you want to know on which CD is a package, without :

  1. Mounting CD
  2. Searching
  3. Unmounting
  4. Swear and
  5. Go back to 1

Then you can :

  1. Mount CD #1 (mount -F hsfs /dev/dsk/<CDROM DEVICE> /mnt or, if you have automount cd /cdrom/cdrom0 or something like that)
  2. Go in the Solaris_10/Product directory of the CD
  3. Do grep -l <PACKAGE NAME> .virtual_packagetoc_*
  4. which will output the .virtual_packagetoc_N where N is the number of the CD holding that package.

Exemple :

# pwd
/mnt/Solaris_10/Product
# grep -l SUNWzsh .virtual_packagetoc_*
.virtual_packagetoc_5
#

So SUNWzsh, the package for ZSH shell, is on CD #5 of Solaris 10 distribution (damn, I don’t have it !)

This tip is courtesy of BlaF (thanks dude !)