In the computer networking field, traceroute is a diagnostic tool for displaying the hops and the round-trip time for each hop. Ping, on the other hand, computes round-trip times only from the destination point. But if you are just interested in finding out the number of hops to a destination and not the round-trip times, ping is an alternative utility to traceroute.
If you need to run scripts on specific weeks on a UNIX machine, then there is a easy way to determine this.
The tree command has been around in Windows for a very long time to print out the directory structure but this is still not available in most of the Unix variants. Most of the new Linux distributions do seem to have the tree command available.
As I always have a tendency to forget the special variables used in shell scripts, I am going to document down the variables here.
At work, I have a couple of shell scripts to perform LDAP queries. Initially the scripts were hard-coded with the login credentials of a read-only user. But as the scripts were enhanced to handle LDAP query updates, I realised that it was not a good idea anymore to hard-code the username and password as I was just inviting trouble. And the scripts will be a big NO during system audit.
I have some shell scripts that will perform certain actions only on a weekend (Saturday or Sunday). There are two ways to solve the “is it a weekend” logic.
Solaris does not ship with the GNU tar and by default, the tar command in Solaris does not allow you to create gzip or bzip2 files, but only pure tarballs. You will need to create a tar file first and then compress the tarball with the gzip command.
I have been looking for a tool to encrypt Ki values (into eKi) using AES encryption. Ki is a 128-bit value used in authenticating the SIMs on the mobile network.
To perform disk usage monitoring of users on a UNIX system, you will, first of all, need to determine the home directories of the users. You might ask, “Aren’t all the user home directories found under /home?”. Well, typically yes, but it’s not always true.
Everyone knows that DNS is used to translate hostnames to IP addresses, but do you know that DNS can also be used to retrieve the domain name when the IP address is known?
