Suse & OpenSuse : Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, How Tos and Troubleshooting

Using the “date” command and it’s % options

April 17, 2009 – 12:03 am

Well, you can’t really get a date with this command but it is a very useful command to know for administrative tasks as well as for automatic documentation through scripting. However, the date command’s options often baffles a lot of people (well, in my administering SuSE Linux class anyway) especially when they read about the [...]

By admin | Posted in tips | Comments (0)

Short and quick tutorial for the command “tar”

April 16, 2009 – 3:00 am

We have recently posted about tarball and the use of tar coupled with compression programs to create it.  Here, we will go through three (3) short tutorial on using tar. To compress a list of files To compress (the c in the options) a list of files into a specific file (the f in the [...]

By admin | Posted in utility | Comments (0)

What are .Z, .gz and .bz2 files?

April 15, 2009 – 12:04 am

As part of a tarball distribution and also other compressed files, you will come across files with the .Z, .gz and .bz2 extensions.  These are basically files that have been compressed using different applications, much like the .zip files predominantly found in the Windows environment.

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “find”

April 5, 2009 – 11:30 pm

We can learn about commands in Linux using the manpages, for example, to learn how to use the find command, we can just do # man 1 find However, this means we need to read the long manual and generally most of us are somewhat impatient.  We will give short and quick tutorials on the [...]

By admin | Posted in desktop | Comments (0)

What’s the difference between “su” and “su –”?

March 6, 2009 – 4:54 am

We get asked this question quite often and maybe it is good to give a simple explanation.  “su” by itself means that you would like to assume the super user identity.  You can also assume the identity of another user using “su <userid>”.

By admin | Posted in tips | Comments (0)