Category Archives: Linux / Unix Tips

Useful tips for the Linux / Unix systems administrator

Huh? Why ‘service vmware-tools status’ no longer works on newer Linux VMs – Tip of the Week

After deploying a CentOS v6.6 VM via vCloud Director today, I was puzzled that I couldn’t confirm whether VMware Tools was running after installing it. [root@ZenOSS-POC ~]# service vmware-tools status vmware-tools: unrecognized service Huh? Surely not! [root@ZenOSS-POC ~]# ps -ef|grep … Continue reading

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Ubuntu / Debian equivalent to yum check-update – Tip of the Week

…been searching for the equivalent command to yum check-update for Ubuntu and Debian, and thanks to some Google searching, found what I needed, as follows: 1.  sudo apt-get update …to ensure you have the latest package index files, then 2.  … Continue reading

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search / find by size on Unix / Linux systems – Tip of the Week

Searching by size on *nix systems by using the find command may not be readily apparent. Say you have a file system approaching 100% full (/var/log is an example which comes to mind), and you want to do some housekeeping. … Continue reading

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bash shell – Tip of the Week: Those pesky comments!

Have you grown tired of going through lines and lines of comments in a configuration file, when all you want to see is what parameters are actually set? Are you tired of using ‘grep -v‘ to eliminate the lines you … Continue reading

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