Life on the Command Line

[Sundar Nagarajan]

Rolando Pereira wrote:
> Yesterday I learnt about Iftop. It always you to look at what IPs you
> are connects, the amount of traffic, etc. Kinda like Firestarter, except
> it uses Curses, and you can't define iptable rules. If you want a more
> graphic representation, use Ethstatus. It's more colourful, but it
> doesn't show much information as Iftop. For something that's between
> those two (more information than Ethstatus, but less than Iftop), try Bmon.

I would also recommend iptraf. It is a lot like iftop, but (IMO) has a 
niftier interface. Like iftop, it requires root access to get raw access 
to the network interface.

> Htop is also very nice. It's like top, but with better controls, color,
> etc. Htop/top allows you to check the process you are running, the
> memory that each is using, the CPU, the total memory usage, etc.
> Like that Ctrl+Alt+Del in Windows (I know Gnome as something like it,
> but I forgot it's name, gnome-monitor I think).

Have been using top all these years, and just stumbled on htop recently 
when I tried grml (a Debian-based LiveCD distro that uses Knoppix-style 
hardware detection and is focussed towards text-tool afficionados. htop 
is definitely highly recommended. It is like top on steroids. The most 
important improvement over top is the ability to scroll down the list of 
processes. If you have a lot of processes running, top just shows as 
many as fit on your screen - making it less useful.

> If you are going to use the command line a lot, you better learn how to
> use the Screen package. It allows you to have several fullcreen
> terminals in one window (like tabbing, except it can be used everywhere,
> gnome-terminal, konsole, rxvt, etc.). You can also detach a window, and
> then reteach it in another terminal, split the window and view two
> shells at the same time, etc. Use Google to see something about it. Just
> remember this two commands, "Ctrl+a c" creates a new window, and "Ctrl+a
> 2" shows a list of all windows in that session and allows you to choose
> the window you want to watch (use "Ctrl+a A" to set the name of the
> window, so you don't just see a couple of "bash" when you press "Ctrl+a
> 2"). All the command start with "Ctrl+a" by default.
> On, and "Ctrl+a k" to kill a window.

Screen is also highly recommended - especially to improve productivity 
if you use ssh to access a system remotely and intermittently. It can be 
thought of like a VNC session in text mode. Multiple programs (sessions) 
can be kept running, and restored.