Quick tip: Monitor Logs Live
There are times you want to monitor log files and immediately see new entries as it is updated. This is easily achieved using ‘tail’.
tail is used to display the end of a file and by default shows the last 10 lines of a file using:-
Install Zabbix Server 1.8.9 on CentOS6
The following instructions will install the latest version of Zabbix server on CentOS6 including setting up mysql databases. It presumes a fairly basic install of CentOS6.
Zabbix is an open source, highly customisable server monitoring tool. More details are available here.
These instructions use the EPEL repository for a more upto date version than the included version in the main repos.
How to Import all your existing Instapaper Items to Evernote
Please note, depending on the amount of Instapaper items you may need a Evernote premium account if you wish to make all your articles synced.
The script will parse each URL from your Instapaper account though Instapaper Mobalizer before adding it to your Evernote notebook to tidy things up a little. The page title of the website becomes the note title.
Get External IP address from Ubuntu Command line
Some times you want to check your external IP address of your server. This can easily be done with:-
curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'
As you can see you will require curl installed, if you don’t have it type:-
apt-get install curl
Split Files in to Smaller Chunks
I had problem copying off a large file on a server so I decided that it may be easier to chop the file up in to smaller pieces. This can be easily achieved by:-
nohup nice split --line-bytes=500m foo.tar.gz foo_ &
To break it down, ‘nohup nice’ runs the task in the background, ‘split’ is the command we are using, ‘–line-bytes=500m’ this defines the size of each piece, in this case 500MB each, ‘ foo.tar.gz’ the file you want to split, ‘foo_’ the starting part of each piece of the filenames, then finally ‘&’ part of the nohup.
This will create files 500mb in size named, foo_aa, foo_ab, foo_ac…….and so on.
To piece the files back together we use:-
nohup nice cat foo_a* > foo_FULL.tar.gz &
This time we use ‘cat’ and specify ‘foo_a*’ as the input files and ‘foo_FULL.tar.gz’ as the resulting combined file.
Rercursivly chmod just Folder OR Files
I recently had a requirement when installing wordpress to change the permissions of all files to 0644 and all folders to 0755. Instead of running a chmod -r to make all files and folders a certain permission and then manually having to go through and change all the folders manually, there are two simple commands to do this all for you. Read more 
Quick Tip: Re-run command as sudo
If you run a command and get an error such as ‘rm: Test/Downloads: Permission denied’ and you know you should have used sudo at the beginning of the command there is a quick way to correct this. Read more
Compress files with .tar.gz whilst preserving permissions
Every once in a while you may want to back up some files to send somewhere else or you just want to make a backup before messing around with some files and want to have a fall back option if things go wrong. My favourite way to do this is with tar.
When using tar you have the ability to backup a specific file or folder, compress it and in may cases preserving important permissions which is crucial if you are editing system files.
Read more
News: WikiNixi
WikiNixi is born!! WikiNiki has been created as my involvement with Linux based command line has grown over the last year.
With many close similarities of the Mac OS X and Linux command line it seemed just perfect to merge them in to one resource.
The aim is to provide information on commands that are mutual to both platforms as well as many that will be independent to one another.
I look forward to growing this site in many new directions over the coming months. Any feedback will be gratefully received and considered.
Speed up commonly used SSH connections
If like me, you are constantly making SSH connections and you are fed up of the typing the usual syntax every time or just plain lazy, you can easily create shortcuts to speed up the connection. Read more