General good housekeeping For LINUX
janu
As we mentioned before, it is easy enough to make a mess of the system.
We can't put enough stress on the importance of keeping the place tidy.
When you learn this from the start, it will become a good habit that
will save you time when programming on a Linux or UNIX system or when
confronted with system management tasks. Here are some ways of making
life easier on yourself:
Make a bin directory for your program files and scripts.
Organize non-executable files in appropriate directories, and make as
many directories as you like. Examples include separate directories for
images, documents, projects, downloaded files, spreadsheets, personal
files, and so on.
Make directories private with the chmod 700 dirname command.
Give your files sensible names, such as Complaint to the prime minister
050302 rather than letter1
2 . Make space
On some systems, the quota system may force you to clean up from time
to time, or the physical limits of your hard disk may force you to make
more space without running any monitoring programs. This section
discusses a number of ways, besides using the rm command, to reclaim
disk space.
Run the quota -v command to see how much space is left
3. Compressed files
Compressed files are useful because they take less space on your hard
disk. Another advantage is that it takes less bandwidth to send a
compressed file over your network. A lot of files, such as the man
pages, are stored in a compressed format on your system. Yet unpacking
these to get a little bit of information and then having to compress
them again is rather time-consuming. You don't want to unpack a man
page, for instance, read about an option to a command and then compress
the man page again. Most people will probably forget to clean up after
they found the information they needed.
So we have tools that work on compressed files, by uncompressing them
only in memory. The actual compressed file stays on your disk as it is.
Most systems support egrep, zgrep, zcat, zmore and such to prevent
unnecessary decompressing/compressing actions.
4. More about log files
Some Linux programs insist on writing all sorts of output in a log
file. Usually there are options to only log errors, or to log a minimal
amount of information, for example setting the debugging level of the
program. But even then, you might not care about the log file. Here are
some ways to get rid of them or at least set some limits to their size:
Try removing the log file when the program is not running, if you are
sure that you won't need it again. Some programs may even see, when
restarted, that there is no log file and will therefore not log.
If you remove the log file and the program recreates it, read the
documentation for this particular program in search for command options
that avoid making log files.
Try making smaller log files by logging only the information that is
relevant to you, or by logging only significant information.
Try replacing the log file with a symbolic link to /dev/null; if you're
lucky the program won't complain. Don't do this with the log files of
programs that run at system boot or programs that run from cron