UNIX tips

Here’s a collection of some the UNIX tips that I use the most.
One of the common problems I have is that the backspace key doesn’t work. It’s not a big problem because I can always use either the delete key or manually do a CTRL+H. But sometimes its nice to fix the backspace key properly.
It can also be helpful to set an informative prompt, one that shows the system login name and the system name. Just having # as your prompt when you are flicking between multiple systems can be confusing.
I’ve been told that the best way to restart or shutdown a Solaris system is use the INIT command, which takes a number as to which initialization level you want to go to.
But I can never remember what number to use, so I had to create a table of the Solaris INIT levels.
While some people don’t like the BASH shell, for what ever reason, it does make using the UNIX prompt a little easier. However you don’t want to change the root shell to use BASH in case the /usr/bin directory is not available when the system boots. What you can do is configure the root account to use BASH only if it is available, otherwise default to the C shell.
Sometimes an easy way to clean up a system, is to remove old files by finding files older than a certain number of days.