Keeping Track of My IP Address
My main computer at home acts as a file and media server for the whole house, so it's pretty much turned on all the time. There are times when I'm away from home that I want to remotely access or download a file from my home computer. My home internet service uses a dynamic IP address and every once in a while we get a short interruption to our power that forces the modem to reset. Of course, when that happens, the modem pulls a new IP address. I thought it would be handy if I could come up with a script to keep track of my current IP address for me. Read more
Creating A Terminal Window Clock
If you've been using Linux for a while, you may be familiar with the terminal command, date. The date command will display the current date and time to the terminal. On my system, the default output of date looks like this: Read more
Command Line Basics: Finding Files
In today's post I'm going to show how to use the command line find program to search for files. There are certainly different GUI tools available in Linux, such as Beagle, to search for files. The advantage of many of these systems is that they index the files on your system so that the searching is rather fast. The disadvantage is that the indexing can often slow down system performance, so many users end up disabling it. There's also the situation where you might not have access to a GUI, like when you're logged in to your web hosting server through ssh. Read more
Bash to Basics: The For Loop
Previously I've shown how to use the bash while loop in a bash script. Today I'm going to show how to use another type of do loop in bash: the for loop.
The for loop is a little different from the other looping structures in bash. The other loop structures work by evaluating whether an expression is true or false. The for loop works on lists of values. As long as there are items left in the list, the for loop will execute.
Here's a basic example. Read more
Command Line Basics: Cut Fields With awk
There are times when you will want to trim some information from the output of a command. This may be because you want to feed that output into another command. Whatever the reason for wanting to manipulate the output, awk is one of many tools available in GNU/Linux to perform this task. Read more


