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Questions tagged [unix]

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia page

Unix was originally written in assembly but has since been rewritten in C. It has been branched many times both commercially and open source. One popular variant is the BSD variant which originated from the University of California, Berkeley. It also gave rise to Linux.

Notable variants

  • Silicon Graphics - Irix
  • IBM - AIX
  • Sun Microsystems - Solaris
  • Hewlett Packard - HP-UX

Unix is officially trademarked as UNIX.

Unix on Wikipedia

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Is there a paging version of `watch`?

Under a UNIX shell, how can I get a similar effect to the watch command, but with paging so that I can scroll around in the output if it takes up more than one screen? In other words, I want a program that is to watch what less is to cat. As an…
David Dean
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Best practices for keeping UNIX packages up to date?

How do you keep your servers up to date? When using a package manager like Aptitude, do you keep an upgrade / install history, and if so, how do you do it? When installing or upgrading packages on multiple servers, are there any ways to speed the…
Aron Rotteveel
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Is it possible to set a timeout on openssl's s_client command?

I've got a script which uses openssl's s_client command to pull certificates for a big set of hosts. Some of these hosts will inevitably be unreachable because of a firewall. Is it possible to set the s_client timeout to something much shorter…
Justin Ainsworth
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I just did a chmod -x chmod

So I did a chmod -x chmod. How I can fix this problem? How do I give execute rights back to chmod?
Rook
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How to pipe stderr without piping stdout

How do I pipe the standard error stream without piping the standard out stream? I know this command works, but it also writes the standard out. Command 2>&1 | tee -a $LOG How do I get just the standard error? Note: What I want out of this is to…
C. Ross
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Preferred format of file names which include a timestamp

As we all know "unix" can have anything in a file except '/' and '\0', sysadmins however tend to have a much smaller preference, mainly due to nothing liking spaces as input ... and a bunch of things having a special meaning for ':' and '@' among…
James Antill
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Should I create ZFS zpools with whole disks or partitions?

I am making zpools on FreeBSD machine. While creating zpools I observe these two cases: If I take raw disks and create zpool then I am able to form zpools and they are working perfectly. If I format disks using gpart in freebsd-zfs format and then…
shivams
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How can I manually run a nagios check from the command line?

When defining and testing new services in nagios I have been restarting nagios, then clicking the service, and rescheduling a check for as soon as possible, then waiting until the check happens. Is there a more efficient way to do this? I'd like to…
cwd
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Can I call pushd/popd and prevent it printing the stack?

After calling pushd/popd in bash, it will print off the current directory stack. Is there any way to prevent this behaviour, so that it will act 'quitely'? This sort of noise in a command is uncommon in unix tools.
Amandasaurus
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Scripting alternatives to Bash shell scripts

I have just migrated to a UNIX workstation. My memory of Bash shell scripts has faded since school and I find the syntax to be highly confusing. I am wondering what other scripting languages are used to automate tasks. The two most popular ones…
Scott Davies
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Why can't I ssh into my new EC2 Instance?

I created a new instance (tiny, 64 bit AMI linux from Amazon) Created a new key pair called "mir". I downloaded mir.pem and put it in my ~/.ssh folder. I even did ssh-add mir.pem. Then I tried to ssh ubuntu@public_DNS_from_amazon Why doesn't it…
Alex
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Alternative to Daemontools (djbtools) to supervise unix processes?

I've used Daemontools to provide a simple and reliable way to supervise Unix services on my servers. It works well, but it requires a different way of thinking (The DJB Way) and some common complaints are: TAI64N based timestamps Doesn't store…
Stefan Lasiewski
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What's the maxium number of files a Unix folder can hold?

What's the maxium number of files a Unix folder can hold? I think it will be the same as the number of files.
PERR0_HUNTER
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4 answers

Differences between /dev/sda and /dev/sda1

I know that /dev/sda is the raw device, and that /dev/sda1 is the partition or virtual device. But I'm a little confused as to why the sda# only comes up some of the time, or only on certain systems. What causes this to occur? Perhaps the times when…
decoy
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How to FTP multiple folders to another server using mput in Unix?

I am logged in on a server (using Putty). from there I'm connecting using FTP to another server. I want to copy several folders from the first server to the second server using mput. Like: ftp> mput folder1 folder2 folder3 But I get "folder1: not a…
Mircea
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