patrick

patrick

The Many Routes to Root

There are a number of ways to get to root access, some of them not entirely intuitive.  For example, what's the difference between sudo su and sudo -i?  How about su - ? Root can be used in a variety of ways, so there are a variety of ways to get

Scheduling and Killing Processes

Sometimes processes crash, or use too many resources, or just need to be gracefully shut down.  In this post, I'll cover the following: * nice * renice * kill * pkill Let's talk about killing first. There are actually two different commands with "kill" in them, and they do different things.  There are also

elif: Not a Tolkien Character

elif is a portmanteau consisting of the words "else" and "if".  In bash (and Python), it's a way to test multiple statements before closing a loop, as opposed to the single statement test provided by else.  If a typical if/then construct uses an if/then/else format, elif allows

What is Docker?

And why would you want to use it? Put simply, a Docker container is like a mini virtual machine.  It contains just enough to do what it needs to do, and no more.  It's also isolated from the machine it's running on, so crashing the host machine is many orders