CLI

In this article, we explain which scripts are run to configure BASH and what sort of stuff you can put in those scripts to customise your shell.

If you are new to using the command line, this is the place to find out about what it is, what you can do with it, and where best to begin learning about this powerful interface.

In this post, we'll show you some handy bash shortcuts. When you've become comfortable with using these (or at least some of them) your productivity at the bash shell will improve considerably!

Here we'll cover what BASH is, some basic BASH usage, and point you toward what you need to learn to configure BASH and customise the prompt.

Understand how Ubuntu / Linux file permissions and special mode bits work. Learn how to change these permissions using the chmod command. Find out how default permissions for new files are configured via a user's umask value.

Netcat is a utility which allows us to perform a myriad of network related tasks such as data transfer and remote command execution over any TCP or UDP port. This post covers basic usage of the tool.

This article is aimed at people new to Ubuntu and linux in general. It will give you some background info about what a terminal is (and what a shell is) and how to tweak your terminal's profile.

Learn how to manage user accounts and groups. We walk through how to add and delete users and groups (normal and system). Find out how to add/remove existing users to/from groups and how to create an admin account.

The grep command is one of the best pattern matching tools available for Ubuntu and Linux users in general. This is a quick FAQ style flyby to show beginners some handy grep functionality.

Use the find command to locate files on your box that were accessed or modified recently, or to find files based on size or owner.

In this post we'll show you how to use the Ubuntu/Linux find command to locate files on your system based on file permissions.

This is the first of several posts about the "find" command line utility. Below, we'll introduce some basic practical usage to help get you started with using this handy piece of software without getting in too deep.

Learn how the Ubuntu/Linux find command can perform actions on each result returned from a search. We'll cover actions carried out by find (itself), and combining find with external programs to help you get productive.

If you're new to encryption or simply want to encrypt a file but don't want to bother setting up a public/private key pair (required by some tools), then these simple examples of using OpenSSL could be what your looking for.

If you like Netcat but don't want to use it because it offers no encryption you should take a look at Cryptcat, It allows the functionality of netcat, but uses twofish encryption to encrypt the data. In this post, we explain how to use Cryptcat

Learn how to use military-grade encryption using GPG. This is the first in a series of guides that will teach you about using gpg for both symmetric and asymmetric encryption.

This is the next post in our series of GPG guides. Here, we cover asymmetric encryption and decryption of data using the gpg command.

This GPG guide covers how to digitally sign data in various ways, explains the purpose of digital signatures, and shows how to verify them.

This GPG guide covers how to use the gpg command for simple yet strong symmetric encryption using various different block cipher algorithms.

If you need to find out what processes on your desktop or server are doing a lot of disk I/O (reads/writes) or swapping in and out of memory a lot, then take a look at iotop.

Do you suspect that some process running on your box is using up a lot of network bandwidth? Would like to investigate and identify the culprit? If so, you need the nethogs utility.

The ps program can be used to identify problematic processes, for example you can use it to identify hung processes, cpu busy processes and memory hungry processes. We've already taken a quick look at some basic usage of the ps command. In this tutorial, we'll cover some advanced usage.

The ps program can be used to take a snapshot of processes on your system. This post shows you some basic usage.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use top to monitor your processes in real time. Top gives an overview of what cpu and memory resources the processes on your system are using.

Enabling SSH connection sharing allows you to reuse an existing ssh connection thus saving resources and removing the need to enter a password. Here, we'll run you through setting it up. We'll also mention a few pitfalls to watch out for.

OpenSSH is at the top of the pile of utilities you can use for encrypted data transfer. Here, we'll cover how to install the server side daemon.

OpenSSH is an implementation of SSH (secure shell) which is used for secure communication between two machines (a client and a server). OpenSSH is the best tool you can use for secure data transfer. Below, we'll run through how you can start using it for your data transfer needs.

In this post, we'll run through the commands that will allow you to use SFTP to securely transfer files from one machine to another using this interactive alternative to SCP.

Secure copy (or scp as the program is called) is a program used to securely copy files between hosts on a network. In this post we cover the various use cases of scp.

In this post we cover how using a public/private key pair for SSH, you can enable automatic login to remote machines and (if you use a passphrase protected private key) you can improve the security of your communications.

Securely mount remote file systems easily with sshfs. Edit remote files in your favourite GUI editor locally as if they were present on your own box.

Learn how to quickly install, update, remove, and search for software via the command line in this FAQ style introduction to the apt-get and apt-cache commands.