Five favorite tools

Everyone has their lists. Here's my list of "top 5 tools every linux admin needs to know intimately":

5) screen ( http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/ ) I love the ability to log in to a box, work a bit, detach my screen, go home, re-attach to the screen, and it's like I never left the session (technically, I didn't)

4) lsof ( http://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ) - gives info about all open files. This is one of the standard troubleshooting tools for finding network issues, "why cant I rm that file?", and a host of other annoyances.

4) strace ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/strace/ ) - need to find out why a running process is hanging? strace -p [PID] that bad boy. Like lsof, I cannot live without this.

3) splitvt ( http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/projects/splitvt/ ) - I am always needing to compare two files side by side, and sometimes I just don't want to go through the series of logins to get to a specific machine to do it. SplitVT will give you multiple usable windows to work in inside of a single VT. Very cool.

2) awk ( http://www.gnu.org/manual/gawk/ ) - when im in a situation where I want to grab specific data from something, this is my best friend. Like when I need to grab the MAC address of my eth0 device: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep HWadd | awk '{ print $5 }'

and finally - Rick's number one.. the single most oft used utility I have.. and the one that is going to get me branded as being on "THAT SIDE" -

1) vim ( http://www.vim.org/ ) - vi .. improved.. :) it's a tool; it's my preferred tool for editing nearly anything (except this blog, cause the web interface is also a tool - and handy) I can't expand on this any further.. either you use it or you don't..

:wq