Although the dd command is a great option for creating images of partitions, it creates a bit-by-bit copy so that it also copies empty space, making your partition large and slow to create. Partimage has the advantage of only copying your data to the image.

Gnome system restrictions utility Lockdown Editor lets you create a profile that limits a user to a set of application that a system administrator allows. It has a nice, logically structured GUI that allows administrators to choose and click checkboxes on the options that you want to deny for user access.

Understanding options that can be used with the Linux command cat. This command can be used to view, create, or join multiple text files together.

On Unix platform, tar command is the primary archiving utility. Understanding various tar command options will help you master the archive file manipulation.

Admins use ps all the time to look at processes running on a system. But do you make the best use of the multitude of options this very useful tool has, or do you stick to a tiny, tested handful? Here are some ps options to check out that you may not have encountered before.

I've always wanted to know how to create command line options for my Bash scripts. After some research I found there are two functions available to handle this; getopt and getopts. I'm not going to get into the debate about which one is better. getopts is a shell builtin and seems a little easier to implement than getopt, so I'll go with that for now.

When invoked without arguments, the date command displays the current date and time. Depending on the options specified, date will set the date and time or print it in a user defined way. I’ve seen many people writing a perl script for calculating yesterday or tomorrow. Computer loves numbers but we love relative terms like 2 days ago.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux®. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed).

In addition to creating programming structures, you can also use the semi-colon to separate stand-alone commands that you want to execute from the same command entry. If you wanted to cd to a certain directory and then look at its contents, you could enter each command on its own line. Or, you could enter them both on the same line. This process is called command chaining.