Unix/Linux Quickies …

A few helpful *nix commands (aka brain dump … it’s too full) …

• Archive only a specific type of files within a dir and all subdirs, preserving file paths in the archive:
  tar -czvf config-files-20071116.tgz `find . -name "*.cfg"`
• Kill a running process, the easy way:
  pkill processString
  (processString can be any portion of the command running to be killed - e.g. pkill firefox)
• Get the PID of a running process, the easy way:
  pgrep processString
  (processString can be any portion of the command running - e.g. pgrep firefox could return 1123)
• Disable email notification to the owner of the cron, from a running cron entry:
  Add “ > /dev/null 2>&1 ” to the end of the cron job line (means send any standard output to /dev/null and redirect standard error (2) to standard output (1)).

h u g h