I am conducting three mini surveys, as I am just entering bash programing.

1.How many commands do you know?



2. What commands do you use the most?



3. In what capacity do you use the commands? (IE Networking, system admin, web server etc.)


My goal is to see which commands I need to know for various job duties, I'm reading Linux Command Pocket Guide and Linux Command shell scripting, but you guys are already in the trenches

Thanks!
Mohtech

1. Wow, that's hard to say. I probably use 75 to 100 frequently enough that I would be able to think of them if I were to try to make a comprehensive list of all of them that I know.

2. cd, ls, top, w, who, grep, last, awk, sed, cut, uniq, sort, cat, less, more, lsof, ps, kill, rm, mkdir, mv, cp, top, exec, xargs, netstat, nc, tar, gzip, gunzip, chown, chmod. exit is one that I use every time I login to a server. I've included some that are not strictly speaking "commands" in the bash sense of the term, like netstat. I've excluded those that I use only within shell scripts, like test and break.

3. Sys admin for about 1400 Linux servers and 600 Windows servers. Almost all of them are web servers, database servers (largely MySQL), and mail servers.

Zaichick,

How do install Linux server #1401?

If the question is not clear, how in the world do you install and manage 1400 servers? What special techniques do you use? Do you have a master from which you clone every new machine? How do you remember 1400 root passwords? How do you upgrade to the next MySQL release? If a machine breaks, how to you restore it? How do you keep track of all configurations?

Mohtech,

Sorry I didn't want to hijack your thread.

I manage only 15 servers & workstations (but none of them are equal )
The commands I use most are ls, grep, sed, awk, cp, mv, chmod, chown, less, joe, iptables, jnettop, top, tcpdump, ssh, ping, traceroute, ps, find, ncftp, mount, dc, man(!) and su.

Many commands are not strictly bash commands, but I use them command line.

jlinkels

jlinkels,

So as not to hijack the thread...if there are other questions not related to the topic, feel free to email me. Briefly:

Thankfully, I'm not alone--sorry if I seemed to imply that I was. I am one of three senior sys admins on a team of about 17 techs. We keep the root passwords in a database, which also has the basic config details for each server. We install about 15-20 new servers per week, and have four techs that take care of this angle. These four also deal with hardware failures under sys admin guidance.

We do an auto-install from a PXE boot that automates the bulk of the install, and run a post-install script on most of them that handles most of the basic configuration.

As far as updating the machines: The end users need to tell us if they need to have something additional installed or updated to get new features or functionality. We keep a close eye on security errata and update accordingly by querying the database to determine which machines are in need of a given update or updates. Once we have a list, we notify the end users of the impending updates, divide up the list, and get the updates done as soon as possible. To this end, yum/up2date handles most things nicely, though we are currently developing a way to push updates down to each needed server from a central box.

maybe this will help

1.How many commands do you know?
I agree that this is hard to answer.


2. What commands do you use the most?
ls, cd, rm, mv, cp, exit, su, mkdir, rmdir, tar, gunzip, vi, ps, kill, ssh, telnet, lynx, jobs, ifconfig, route, installpkg, df, w, pwd, man, apropos, smbclient, mount, umount, ln, chown, chmod, cat, locate, find, grep, more.
Those are some that I can think of off of the top of my head, and like zaichik, some of these are applications, not just bash commands, but they are commands I regularly use from th CLI.



3. In what capacity do you use the commands? (IE Networking, system admin, web server etc.)

I use them as a network engineer and for general system administration.