Useful Linux Commands

Log

If we have a log file foo.log:

Some of the most frequently used commands are:

• cat foo.log
• tail -f foo.log
• vim foo.log

If we want to find some record from the file by using vim:

• vim foo.log

• Press G jump to the end of the file

• Press ? + keyword to search the corresponding record

• Press n to search from bottom to top, N to search from top to bottom

• tail -f foo.log can check if there is any change of the log file.

For large files, it’s better to use grep. If we want to check a user’s log file by searching the user’s ID, we can use:

• cat foo.log | grep <UserID>

Then we can find all the records containing UserID from the file.

If we want to find the line number of the info, we can add -n parameter, which the previous command line becomes cat -n foo.log | grep <UserID>

If we want to check lines before and after for the current line:

• sed -n "1888,1888p" foo.log: start search from line 1888 and end the serach at the end of line 1888

• cat -n foo.log | tail -n +1888 | head -n 50: start from line 1888 and push foward 20 lines.

If we do not have an exact query word, we can use more to browse or output to an file:

• cat foo.log | grep <keyword> | more
• cat foo.log | grep <keyword> &gt; /home/ghostian/tmpfiles/output.txt

Sometimes if we want to cauculate how many lines does the log file have, we can use:

• cat foo.log | wc -l

Process and Prot

There are two commands to see the current process:

• ps -ef
• ps aux

By using | pipeline and grep to filter out the process we need, for example:

• ps -ef | grep java

If we want to kill the procee, we can use:

• kill -9 <ProcessID>

To check the port, we can use netstat -lntup

To find the information of a specific port: lsof -i:<port>

System Status

top to view process stat in real time