Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
This topic deals with some system tools I've recently encounterd. I figured
everyone should know about them. If you don't see your favourite tool here, please add your comments.
In some cases, I've merely reproduced the first bit of the man page for the command in
question.
Thanks to Lazarus\ from #FreeBSD on undernet irc for prompting this topic.
Last will list the sessions of specified users, ttys, and hosts, in reverse time
order. Each line of output contains the user name, the tty from which the session was
conducted, any hostname, the start and stop times for the session, and the duration of the
session. If the session is still continuing or was cut short by a crash or shutdown,
last will so indicate.
strings
This command will print the strings of printable characters in files. Very
useful. strings is mainly useful for determining the contents of non-text
files.
swapinfo
This command I've actually seen before and I've discussed it previously under swap files. But I figured it should be included here.
I've not used this command often, so I can't tell you much more about it.
su-2.02# swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type
/dev/wd0s1b 256000 9568 246368 4% Interleaved
systat
This command displays various systems statistics. There are various options.
See man systat. Here's what it did for me.
This displays and updates the information about the top cpu processes. It's
dynamic and will refresh as you watch. Here's a short sample from entering top
-S -I -q:
