Linux

A tour of what makes man pages easy to use: rsync's terse synopsis with a one-line option summary, strace's categorised options, curl's per-option examples, and the value of examples and tables of contents.

A portal of monitoring tools grouped by purpose; notably points to journalctl -b for current-boot logs and systemd-analyze (time, blame, critical-chain) for boot timing.

A curated list of newer command-line tools gathered from suggestions, grouped as modern replacements for standard utilities, tools that work differently, and JSON/CSV/grep-style helpers. Mentions ripgrep, fd, fzf, bat, direnv, jq and vidir.

Julia Evans describes adding beginner-friendly examples to the tcpdump and dig man pages, and mentions tcpdump's -v flag showing a live packet count when writing a capture to a file.

The examples section of the find manual shows safe patterns such as NUL-delimited deletion with -print0 and xargs -0, and pruning directories with -prune. Good to read before running find with rm.

Her five go-to tools for slow or broken systems: strace, dstat, tcpdump/Wireshark, perf and opensnoop. Notes that strace can noticeably slow the traced program.

Explains how automatic updates work and how to change when they run by overriding the apt-daily timers with systemctl edit, ideally with a randomised delay on shared servers.

A collection of easy-to-forget command-line utilities with examples: comm for comparing sorted files, bulk renaming with regular expressions, ImageMagick batch conversions, finding the largest files, and unison for two-way sync.

Covers key-based logins, hardening sshd (disable password and root login), drop-in config directories since Bullseye, keepalive settings and a fix for sessions that hang after login behind some NAT routers (IPQoS).

Summarises about 200 answers on real uses of strace: finding config files and dependencies, working out why a program hangs or is slow, spotting hidden permission errors, and seeing which commands a program runs.