Viewing system information in the Commandline

Posted on March 5th, 2008 in Basics by admin

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GNU/Linux is bursting with information about the system on which it runs. The system’s hardware and memory, its Internet link and current processes, the latest activity of each user — all this information and more is available. And, despite such desktop tools as the KDE Control Center or GNOME’s System Monitor, the easiest place to get all the system information available is still the command line.

 

In many cases, you can view system information via specific commands. Some of these commands are written specifically to give information, while other commands that are mainly intended to alter the system in some way just happen to include parameters for viewing the current state of the system.

In other cases, you can view system information through log or configuration files or the /proc virtual filesystem. Many such files are written in plain text, so all that you need to view them are basic commands that output a file’s content to the command line, such as cat, less, or more.

How to edit and understand /etc/fstab

Posted on March 5th, 2008 in Basics by admin

First read: How to mount filesystems in Linux

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There’s a file called /etc/fstab in your Linux system. Learn what its contents mean and how it’s used in conjunction with the mount command. When you learn to understand the fstab file, you’ll be able to edit its contents yourself, too.