Handling Files on Your Server

SSH (connecting)| SCP (copying) | UNIX commands

This page is a reference for using the Command Prompt window to directly interact with your server instead of using CPanel or other visual tools that your ISP provides. You may need to have your provider explicitely enable these services. Bluehost, for example, requires that you notify them by email and include an image of your driver's license for authentication.

• Download PuTTY and install it.
• Start PuTTY and enter the host name (marieraney.com or whatever). If your provider gave you a different Port than the standard 22, enter that as well. Select Open and the prompt window opens.
• On the Mac use these SSH Instructions.

SSH

Secure Shell is a network protocol that allows secure transfers of data between your own machine and a server. Once you're connected you can use UNIX commands to interact with the web server.

To get into SSH from the Command Prompt or PuTTY window:

$ssh user@domain.com
where -p xx is used if your server does not use the standard port 22 for ssh. Note that -p is lowercase.

Full SSH command set here

SCP (Secure Copy)

Basic syntax: scp FROM TO (always in this order)

scp -r -Pxxx user@domain.com:/home/drupal/sites/default/files ~/Desktop/

where: -r recursively to copy whole folder - leave out for single file copies
-Pxxx

Common UNIX Commands

also see here for UNIX commands or type man name-of-command at the prompt to see the documentation for that command

ls : list files/directories in a directory, comparable to dir in windows/dos.
ls -al : shows all files (including ones that start with a period), directories, and details attributes for each file.

cd : change directory
cd /usr/local/apache : go to /usr/local/apache/ directory
cd ~ : go to your home directory
cd - : go to the last directory you were in
cd .. : go up a directory

pwd : print working directory (to see what directory you're in)

cat : print file contents to the screen
cat filename.txt : cat the contents of filename.txt to your screen

tail : like cat, but only reads the end of the file
tail /var/log/messages : see the last 20 (by default) lines of /var/log/messages
tail -f /var/log/messages : watch the file continuously, while it's being updated
tail -200 /var/log/messages : print the last 200 lines of the file to the screen

more : like cat, but opens the file one screen at a time rather than all at once
more /etc/userdomains : browse through the userdomains file.
hit Space to go to the next page, q to quit

pico : friendly, easy to use file editor
pico /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user's website.

vi : another editor, tons of features
vi /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user's website.

grep : looks for patterns in files
grep root /etc/passwd : shows all matches of root in /etc/passwd
grep -v root /etc/passwd : shows all lines that do not match root

touch : create an empty file
touch /home/burst/public_html/404.html : create an empty file called 404.html in the directory /home/burst/public_html/

ln : create's "links" between files and directories
ln -s /home/username/tmp/webalizer webstats: Now you can display http://www.yourdomain.com/webstats to show your webalizer stats online. You can delete the symlink (webstats) and it will not delete the original stats on the server.

rm : delete a file
rm filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will more than likely ask if you really want to delete it
rm -f filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will not ask for confirmation before deleting.
rm -rf tmp/ : recursively deletes the directory tmp, and all files in it, including subdirectories. BE VERY CAREFULL WITH THIS COMMAND!!!

last : shows who logged in and when
last -20 : shows only the last 20 logins
last -20 -a : shows last 20 logins, with the hostname in the last field

w : shows who is currently logged in and where they are logged in from.

netstat : shows all current network connections.
netstat -an : shows all connections to the server, the source and destination ips and ports.
netstat -rn : shows routing table for all ips bound to the server.

top : shows live system processes in a nice table, memory information, uptime and other useful info.
This is excellent for managing your system processes, resources and ensure everything is working fine and your server isn't bogged down.
top
Shift + M to sort by memory usage
Shift + P to sort by CPU usage

ps: ps is short for process status, which is similar to the top command. It's used to show currently running processes and their PID.
A process ID is a unique number that identifies a process, with that you can kill or terminate a running program on your server (see kill command).
ps U username : shows processes for a certain user
ps aux : shows all system processes
ps aux --forest : shows all system processes like the above but organizes in a hierarchy that's very useful!

file : attempts to guess what type of file a file is by looking at it's content.
file * : prints out a list of all files/directories in a directory

du : shows disk usage.
du -sh : shows a summary, in human-readble form, of total disk space used in the current directory, including subdirectories.
du -sh * : same thing, but for each file and directory. helpful when finding large files taking up space.

wc : word count
wc -l filename.txt : tells how many lines are in filename.txt

cp : copy a file
cp filename filename.backup : copies filename to filename.backup
cp -a /home/burst/new_design/* /home/burst/public_html/ : copies all files, retaining permissions form one directory to another.
find * -type d|xargs -i cp --verbose php.ini {} : copies your php.ini file into all directories recursively.

kill: terminate a system process
kill -9 PID EG: kill -9 431
kill PID EG: kill 10550
Use top or ps ux to get system PIDs (Process IDs)

eg:

PID TTY TIME COMMAND
10550 pts/3 0:01 /bin/csh
10574 pts/4 0:02 /bin/csh
10590 pts/4 0:09 APP

Each line represents one process, with a process being loosely defined as a running instance of a program. The column headed PID (process ID) shows the assigned process numbers of the processes. The heading COMMAND shows the location of the executed process.

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Putting commands together

Often you will find you need to use different commands on the same line. Here are some examples. Note that the | character is called a pipe, it takes date from one program and pipes it to another.
> means create a new file, overwriting any content already there.
>> means tp append data to a file, creating a newone if it doesn not already exist.
< send input from a file back into a command.

grep User /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
This will dump all lines that match User from the httpd.conf, then print the results to your screen one page at a time.

last -a > /root/lastlogins.tmp
This will print all the current login history to a file called lastlogins.tmp in /root/

tail -10000 /var/log/exim_mainlog |grep domain.com |more
This will grab the last 10,000 lines from /var/log/exim_mainlog, find all occurances of domain.com
(the period represents 'anything', comment it out with a so it will be interpretted literally), then send it to your screen page by page.

netstat -an |grep :80 |wc -l
Show how many active connections there are to apache (httpd runs on port 80)

mysqladmin processlist |wc -l
Show how many current open connections there are to mysql

mysqldump -u username -p dbname > file.sql
MySQL Dump

mysql -u username -p database_name <file.sql
Importing MySQL database

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz
UnTAR file

which [perl]
Finding path to [perl]