Symlinks or symbolic links are the Linux equivalent of shortcuts in Windows. Creating symlinks of files or folders can be quite useful in Linux, as you can shorten a path such as /var/www/html/application/configuration/images/config.php to something easier to remember and manage such as /var/www/html/image-config.php. Let’s see how this can be done. Continued…

RPM or Red Hat Package Manager is the default package management solution for Linux distributions based on Red Hat Linux. It’s a pretty useful way to easily install, upgrade, and un-install packages on Linux machines. I remember the days when every Linux package had to be compiled. Let’s see how to perform some basic tasks with RPM. Continued…

The other day I needed to migrate a directory containing a lot of files from one location on my Linux server to another. There are a number of ways I could do this. Using a simple cp command could have done the trick. However, as the data I was copying was a database and I wanted to make sure that the copying was done perfectly, I looked on the Internet and found a brilliant one line bash solution for this. Continued…

Fedora Core Linux and other flavors of Linux that are based on Red Hat Linux ship with a useful utility called ntsysv which provides users with a simple textual interactive interface which enables them to see a list of services. You can see which services are set to start at boot and which are not. You can then modify the settings and add and remove services from startup. There are a number of ways you can add and remove services from starting at boot, but over time I have found ntsysv to be easy to use and effective. Continued…

Scheduling jobs is an essential part of administering Linux servers. We took a look at how to schedule jobs on Linux machine using the cron command earlier. Here’s an alternative to cron – at. The primary difference between the two is that when you schedule a task using cron it execute repeatedly without the need for rescheduling. With at, on the other hand, the scheduling of a task is only for a single execution. Both of these commands have their use, and I would suggest that you get a good understanding of them both. Continued…