TAR is the GNU Tape ARchive utility. It is used to pack the contents of multiple files or directories in an archive file called a tarball. Tar can preserve directory organization including file ownership, permissions, links, as well as directory structure. To save space you can optionally enable compression with gzip, bzip2, or another external [...]

Watch runs a program at regular interval and continuously displays the output. This allows you keep track of the changes that are occurring in the program over time. Run watch in the following way. watch [options] command By default watch updates the command output every 2 seconds. To change this interval us the ‘-n seconds‘ [...]

printf and its family of functions allow you to easily format string data. There are so many formatting options that it is easy to miss some of its more powerful functionality. Here is a rundown of the more useful features and some examples. The basic printf format. printf(format string, format parameter list); The format string [...]

Among the most valuable tools at a Linux administrators disposal is sudo. It lets ordinary users temporarily submit commands as root or another user. To use use this command simply put sudo before any command you want to run with root permissions. sudo command To submit commands as another user use the ‘-u‘ option and [...]