Quick Tips & Cool Commands

Unpacking compressed archives.

gzip - .tar.gz

[doug@linux]$ tar -xvzf archivefile.tar.gz

bzip2 - .tar.bz2

[doug@linux]$ tar -jxvf archivefile.tar.bz2

Show disk space:

[doug@linux]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size Used Avail    Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             1.3G 863M 420M 68%     /
/dev/hda2             3.9G 1.6G   2.3G    40%     /mnt/win/C
/dev/hda3             3.9G 1.7M   3.9G   1%        /mnt/win/D

this is also a good way to see a list of mounted partitions.

Show directory size:

[doug@linux]$ du -hs

[doug@linux]$ du -hs /etc
4.6M /etc

Start a second X display:
go to another console, Ctrl-Alt-F2
login,

[doug@linux]$ startx -- :1

Show a list of partitions:

[doug@linux]$ cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

   3       0       9770544   hda
   3       1       1               hda1
   3       2       4112608   hda2
   3       3       4112640   hda3
   3       5       136048     hda5
   3       6       1406128   hda6

List installed modules:

[doug@linux]$ cat /proc/modules
or
[doug@linux]$ lsmod

To see the kernel startup messages:

[doug@linux]$ dmesg | less

Write kernel startup messages too a text file:

[doug@linux]$ dmesg > ~/dmesg.txt

To find your kernel version:

[doug@linux]$ uname -r

Show free memory:

[doug@linux]$ free -m

su access to X:

[doug@linux]$ xhost +localhost

To mount an ISO image file:

[doug@linux]$ mount -o loop -t iso9660 isofilename /mountpoint

You will need to replace isofilename and mountpoint with the correct
file name and mount point.
I suggest creating an empty directory to use as the mount point.
"/mnt/iso", or "/mnt/temp" would work.

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