“You’ll often hear members of our open source team say, ‘Every time you use Google, you’re using Linux.’ It’s absolutely true.” – That’s according to the people from Google.

Linux has been part of Google ever since the big search engine started doing their thing. “Linux has given us the power and flexibility we need to serve millions of users around the world.”

This is further verified when they stated that (every) Google engineer’s workstation runs some variant of Linux. Even the search result when you do a query on the search engine, those are brought to you by Linux.

I say, if Google uses Linux, let’s all do it!

Oh, by the way… Yahoo’s outgoing mail is powered by qmail, so I guess there is a big possibility that Yahoo too, is using Linux (or Unix, whichever).

We UNIX SysAds have many many tools that can help us administer our servers. What’s great about UNIX is that you don’t have to learn the complicated commands to do what’s need to be done.


There is a saying in the UNIX world that a complex command is just a few commands used altogether. We usually apply pipes on these stuff.

Let’s take DUSK for example… or it can really be DUCKS depending on what version of DU you use.

DUSK is what I use very often every time I want to know the disk usage of the current file systems and the sub directories under that.

The command,

du -sk * | sort -n | more

does exactly that. And here’s the output when executed my home directory.

bash-2.05# du -sk * | sort -rn | more
4409 nrpe
4263 tmp
3399 xilinx
1048 dl4.files
465 unixstuff
244 scripts
30 hosts
7 doy
6 list.tqs.032206
4 LICENSE.TXT
2 help
1 netapp
1 hp84k.NIS

As you can see, it listed all the size of the files and the directories. This is a useful command specially if you’re looking for the disk space hog on you filesystem.


But why use such long command when you can use ‘dusk’ ? I don’t know about you but ‘du -sk * | sort -rn | more’ is a mouthful than ‘dusk’ right?

Here’s what you do: Simply create and alias for that command and assigned it to ‘dusk’ and you’re done.

bash:

# alias dusk=’du -sk * | sort -rn | more’

csh

% set dusk= du -sk * | sort -rn | more

Try it. It will save you tones of typing errors!

Here’ s one cool application for the Open-Source followers! Introducing the portable app. Now, you can enjoy the applications you love from a computer running you know what.

PortableApps.com Suite™ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.

Enough said… This is cool stuff!

Using a portable storage device, such as an IPod (5th Gen) or an USB thumdrive, you can bring along with you all your favorite programs by using PortableApps. You can use the Web, read email, transfer files, chat with friends, ssh into machines, edit images and sounds, watch movies and listen to music, write office documents, zip up the results, and store passwords securely!

From now on, no matter which computer you use, you can always bring your favorite applications with you.

There are lots more application on the website!