Monthly Archives: August 2009

HOWTO Force fsck on the Next Reboot

fsck is used to check and optionally repair one or more Linux file systems.
By creating /forcefsck file you will force the Linux system (or rc scripts) to perform a full file system check.
Create a file called forcefsck:

View Config Files Without Comments

Use this grep invocation to trim comments out of config files. Comments are great but can get in your way if you just want to see the currently running configuration. I’ve found files hundreds of lines long which had fewer than ten active configuration lines.
It’s really hard to get an overview of what’s going on when you have to wade through hundreds of lines of comments.

The regex ^[^#] matches the first character of any line, as long as that character that is not a #. Because blank lines don’t have a first character they’re not matched either, resulting in a nice compact output of just the active configuration lines.