“There are key utilities, command line chains, and scripts that are used to simplify different processes. Some of these tools come with the operating system, but a majority of the Unix tricks come through years of experience and a desire to ease the system administrator’s life. The focus of this article is on getting the most from the available tools and insight across a range of different UNIX environments.”
The command line interface (CLI) like all tools just takes time, familiarity and experience to master.
For me it took about three years of reasonably frequent use to get to a point where you feel in control of the CLI rather than a slave to it. Its that point when you want to view or manipulate something that you can just use the tools right away – you want to manipulate that line in a config file bang! straight through sed, job done.
For me some of the most used utility commands are find, grep (and its variations egrep and fgrep), sed, awk, cat, sort and uniq. When chained together with some command shell glue some great things can be acheived and some nightmares but then that’s all part of the learning process.
Don’t get me wrong I’m by no means a master CLI samurai. I’m just glad that the Unix/Linux CLI offers me the ability to continually learn something new and useful.
The article is not bad either
When chained together with some command shell glue some great things can be acheived and some nightmares but then that’s all part of the learning process.
Behold the nightmares made flesh:
http://www.yak.net/carmen/unix_horror.html
Most unix administrators I’ve come across have at least one horror story and I think the rest are hiding something.
AIX doesn’t come with a ‘top’ or ‘prstat’ command. Is there a way to chain together certain commands to simulate it?
For AIX use topas or nmon. Topas is part of AIX bos.perf. Nmon is at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/analyze_aix/
Much more info that top.
CLI has to be one of the lamer, stupidest acronyms ever coined. It’s discussing the SHELL, it already has a short name, ‘sh’, it doesn’t need three letters in upper case to feel better about itself.
I don’t know about you but ‘command line interface’ seems more meaningful than shell which means nothing.
Blasphemy!
I remember enjoying writing shell scripts, even scheduling them out of a J2EE server for system maintenance. Unfortunately, no one else on the ‘team’ cared much. They also had a tendency to spend a week writing a program to process text files, when the same would take one hour in sh or perl. I put part of the blame on the “Windows mentality”, but it is also true many people tend to choose the hardest way to solve a problem.