So the new server has been taking up pretty much all of my waking (non-working) moments recently as I clumsily feel my way around a system that is accessible primarily via a command-line. It feels oddly exciting, typing commands to a machine tens of thousands of miles away, and then receiving long strings of feedback that scroll by so fast you can barely make them out. I guess I should consider myself lucky that I know PHP pretty well, because a couple of basic commands (mkdir, unlink, etc) are common to both PHP and *nix.
Some interesting bits of trivia I discovered today:
- The PING function in Linux goes on forever. Yup, it will ping a given address until the end of time unless you tell it to stop. That’s the default behavior. How do you stop it? By pressing Ctrl + C (a rather unfortunate keystroke combination, because it makes utterly no sense to someone from an Undo-Cut-Copy background).
- wget is the single coolest *nix command known to man. Feed it an internet address, and it will download whatever file it finds at the end of that string. wget http://www.highfiber.org/index.php will grab that page and download it to the current directory, for example. (ok, it’s probably quite far from being the coolest command, but I used it over a dozen times this evening and it sure felt really fucking cool, every time I saw that little =====> progress bar onscreen.
- User-groups are fragile, delicate things. Kel and I fucked up our user accounts earlier by trying to assign multiple users to the “adm” group. I can only assume this was a bad idea because none of our accounts could login again afterwards.
More cool Linux trivia as I learn them.