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HOW TO : Search which package contains a filename

If you are using a Linux system that uses yum for package management (like Fedora, Centos, RHEL), you can use the following command to find out which package contains a file. This is useful when you want to figure out which package to install. For example, dig (DNS utility) doesn’t come pre-installed on the system. And running “sudo yum install dig” doesn’t do anything.

sudo yum whatprovides '*/dig'

This returns

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
 Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 32:bind-utils-9.8.2-0.47.rc1.el6.x86_64 : Utilities for querying DNS name servers
 Repo : base
 Matched from:
 Filename : /usr/bin/dig

breaking down the command options

whatprovides : Is used to find out which package provides some feature or file. Just use a specific name or a file-glob-syntax wildcards to list the packages available or installed that provide that feature or file.

HOW TO : count lines in windows command line

Say you are using netstat to checl all established network connections on a windows machine (confirmed to work on windows 7+ and windows server 2008+) and want to find out how many connections you have, you can use

netstat -an | find "ESTABLISHED" | find /v /c ""

breaking down the command string

netstat -an : Uses netstat command to display all connections and listening ports (-a) and displays them in numerical form instead of resolving DNS or using common names (-n)

| : piping (passing) output of one command to the next one

find “ESTABLISHED” : Uses find command to filter out to just lines that contain the string “ESTABLISHED”‘

find /c /v “” : exclude blank lines (/v “”) and count the number of remaining lines (/c)

If you wanted to something similar in linux, you can use

netstat -an | grep "ESTABLISHED" | wc -l

HOW TO : Use grep to search for content at end of line

If you want to search for a pattern at the end of a line, you can use

tail -f logfile | grep -v "0$"

breaking down the commands

tail -f : standard tail command. Continuous output to console as the file grows (or until it ends)

grep -v : -v command forces grep to show content that doesn’t match pattern

0$ : This regex is specifically looking for a 0 at the end of the line, which is denoted by $.

HOW TO : Query varnishlogs for requests with 404 responses

varnishlog, one of the tools provided with varnish cache, uses VSL Query Expressions (https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vsl-query.html) to provide some powerful insights into the requests and responses.

Here is a how you can use varnishlog to show all client requests that are ending up with a 404 response.

sudo varnishlog -g request -i ReqURL -q "BerespStatus != 200"

Technically, this particular query shows all client requests with a response other than 200.

Breaking down the commands

-g request : shows all entries related to the request

-i ReqURL : forces varnishlog to only display the Requesting URL

-q “BerespStatus != 200” : query filter to only match non 200 responses. Note that the query has to be enclosed in “”.