Ever want to pass in a command line argument to an alias? You would think you could just do it with $1, but actually you have to create a function and then call that function. So, for instance if you want to pass a portion of a log file name, you could set your alias like this…

alias catlog='function _catIt() { cat /var/logs/$1.log; };_catIt'

then, when you want to see the XX00D log, you just call your alias like so…

catlog XX00D

Ever need to find out what’s using the most space on your Linux box? There are a couple commands that will help make things easier…

To find out how much space you have use:

df -h .

Which will give you output like so…

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda         20G   15G  4.2G  79% /

To list out the directories using the most space, use this handy command…

sudo du /usr/local | sort -n

… where /usr/local is the directory you want info for (you can also just start from root: /)

So you would think that as a programmer for many moons now that I would have considerable experience in VIM and VI, but I’m hear today to admit that I am not. For years I’ve gotten by with my favorite Windows text editor notepad++, but the geek in me wanted to know why everyone loves Vim so much. To that end the 2 things I started with are…

Downloading the Windows vim editor from Vim.org
Working through the tutorial at http://www.openvim.com/tutorial.html

I can’t say I’m a convert yet, but it’s always nice to have another tool in the toolbelt. Here for your and my reference is my quick VIM cheat sheet.

If you’re using the unix find command to search for files with a particular name

find -name theName
find: `./dir/thing': Permission denied
find: `./dir/thing1': Permission denied
find: `./dir/thing2': Permission denied

You might get distracted by all those “Permission denied” errors. The easy way to solve this is to redirect stderr to /dev/null like so…

find -name theName 2>/dev/null

Ever have a script that is executing another script and get an error that looks like this?…

/path/stub.ksh[2]: /path/XX/script.ksh: not found [No such file or directory]

Then you make sure that the file does in fact exist, and that you can read it?

So why does it say there’s “No such file or directory”?

Might want to check if the file has Windows line breaks. Easiest way to do that is run the following…

cat -v /path/XX/script.ksh

… and you’ll probably see that your lines end with ^M characters. If so, you have Window’s line breaks and you might want to look into not introducing them in the first place (save in Unix format), or check out the dos2unix command.