One of the things that excited me while learning Unix/Linux was how quickly one can perform tasks via the command line. Bash is a fully functional scripting language that incorporates Variables, Loops and If/Then statements; the bash shell allows a user to use these functions while performing adhoc tasks via the command line. This is also true for the other common shells such as bourne, korn shell, and csh.
Below I will show 5 example for loops that are run on the command line without being placed into a shell script.
A few weeks back I wrote an article Getting started with SaltStack; that article covered Configuration and Package Automation with Saltstack. In Today's article I am going to cover SaltStack's Remote Execution abilities, a feature that I feel Saltstack has implemented better than other automation tools.
Running a command in a State If you remember from the previous article SaltStack's states are permanent configurations. Adding a command in a Salt state is used when you want to have a command that is run after provisioning a server, run every time Salt manages the state of the system or run when certain conditions are true.
Recently I was working on an issue where an application was not retaining the umask setting set in the root users profile or /etc/profile. After looking into the issue a bit it seemed that the application in question only applied the umask setting that was set in /etc/bashrc and would not even accept the values being the applications own start scripts.
After doing a bit of researched I learned a little bit more about what exactly these files do, the differences between them and when they are executed.
Today's article may be pretty basic for regular readers but hopefully some may find it useful.
This article will cover creating a crontab entry and show some examples of common crontabs. The Cron daemon is a service that runs on all main distributions of Unix and Linux and specifically designed to execute commands at a given time. These jobs commonly refereed to as cronjobs are one of the essential tools in a Systems Administrators tool box.