System Notes Org

Here is an example of how to use awk to extract a column from a text file. The default field separator is a space, so this will work with some text files:    cat somefile.txt | awk '{print $2}' But, if the fields are separated by a delimiter, such as tab, or comma, just specify the field separator by using "-F" before the print statement    cat somefile.txt | awk -F"\t" '{print $2}'   Unix and linux distributions generally come with sed and awk, among other things. The problem. You want to get a list of companies to research before investing in them, and paste only the stock symbols into a Yahoo finance portfolio.   You run a stock screen on a site such as  magicformulainvesting.com , or investors.com but if you try to paste the text into a spreadsheet it may show up as a single row, with no way to extract the column. Here is the process 1.)  Run a Stock Screen Get output similar to this: Company Name (in alphabetical...

At SystemNotes, we love free software. Especially when it is Open Source (source code is readable and may be freely modified by the end users), and available on different platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows, iPad, Android, etc.). When preparing tax returns, many people turn to paid software, or tax professionals. There's nothing wrong with paying for a useful service or software, but linux geeks often turn to shell scripts, or whatever open source software they can find before shelling out any cash -- no pun intended. Here are some useful tools for preparing the US 1040 tax return and most common schedules: Open Tax Solver If your needs are simple, Open tax solver is quick and easy. There are even options for some state taxes. Open Tax Solver http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net There is a simple interface that takes inputs, and when finished, just click "Compute Tax." for the results. Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Income Tax Calculator If you prefer to ha...

I explained how to get a list of hosts using nmap -- using-nmap-to-generate-host-lists.html , but here is another look at the subject. The question is, how do I ping multiple hosts to find out which ones are down? Sure this could be considered a topic of system monitoring, but maybe you just want to reboot a bunch of machines, and make sure they all come back online. This quick check will tell you whether there is a problem or not. Here are three methods for pinging a list of hosts: 1.) for host in `cat all.txt `;do ping -c 1 $host; done 2.) nmap -sP -R -iL all.txt 3.) sudo fping -u < xyz/all.txt First, we assume that you have a text file named all.txt that contains a list of hostnames, one per line. Obviously, the examples here contain fake hostnames, domain names and IPs, as described in another article about vi: vim-tips-search-and-replace.html . --- all.txt --- xyz-1 xyz-2 xyz-3 xyz-4 xyz-5 xyz-6 xyz-7 xyz-8 --- end all.txt --- 1.) Use a for loop in ...

An easy way to get a list of hosts from a single domain that you are a part of, is to query DNS host -l mydomain.com But that is not always practical. Sometimes you have machines that are in different domains, but they all are part of a network you manage. Rather than trying write a script that pings hosts and reports the output, just use nmap for a very fast scan. To scan all hosts in a list of subnets 1) Create a subnets.dat file with one subnet on each line: $ cat subnets.dat 192.168.0.* 192.168.1.* 2) Run nmap with the subnets.dat file as input $ nmap -sP -R -iL subnets.dat Reading target specifications from FILE: subnets.dat Starting nmap V. 3.00 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) Host (192.168.0.0) appears to be down. Host box1.mydomain.com (192.168.0.1) appears to be up. Host box2.mydomain.com (192.168.0.2) appears to be down. Host box3.mydomain.com (192.168.0.3) appears to be up. Host (192.168.0.4) appears to be up. ... Notice how names are resolved ...