[H-GEN] Useful not so obvious tips

Anthony Irwin irwa82 at froggy.com.au
Sun Oct 24 23:50:04 EDT 2004


Hi,

I've been using linux systems for a while now. Since early 2000 when the 
media hype was going on. Anyway I have realised that even though I've 
been using linux as my only home operating system for a number of years 
and manage 3 small linux servers at work I tend to do the same old 
things and every now and then I happen to see people do small things 
differently that seem so much more effective.

I'll list a couple that I feel are fairly well know but think it would 
be interesting to see if anyone else has some tips to be more effective 
that may not be so obvious to someone that just uses their computer in 
the same old ways they did when learning the system.

It might be of benefit to add them to a page on the humbug web site so 
people can go there and see tips on how to be more productive, things 
that aren't listed in the books and are learned from reading tons of 
documentation or from people who already know.

-* When typing a password and you know you typed something wrong you can 
press ctrl + u to clear the password.

-* You can press the tab key for text completion when typing in a shell.

-* You can press the up arrow key to see previously used commands in a 
shell.

I guess other things could be interesting ways of using multiple 
commands together to get different results. I have heard of xset but 
don't know anything about it.

Also I've used grep in combination with ps to see listing of only the 
thing I want to see. like ps aux|grep portfwd

I know this may seem like a silly idea to people who have been using 
unix for years and done anything and everything with it but if you only 
use it at home or in a small office environment you may not of had the 
opportunity or need to combine lots of commands together to do things 
better or faster[1].

The ability to do just about anything if you know how is what makes unix 
systems so great and I know there a probably other ways of doing things 
possibly even better ways of doing things and it's nice to sometimes 
learn a new methodology

Anyway I hope people take the idea up because I would love to see some 
weird and wonderful ways of tackling things. Even if it seems small and 
obvious it may not be just think about how long you've been doing what 
you do.

[1] Small offices seem to want you to do things as fast as possible and 
compromise on quality or finding a better way to be faster next time. 
This can be frustrating when you prever to do things the best way.

-- 
Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin




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