I have gone over more than a few Linux based commands at this point, so I want to introduce a new way of using them; Pipes. Pipes are really cool because they will let you take the command and put its output into another command. There are a nearly infinite amount of ways to use them as well. Enough with the introductions, lets get on to the commands. Lets say that I want to determine the number of connections currently open at the moment on port 80. We can do the command
netstat -anp
And it will give us a distinct number of entries. We are left looking for traffic that is on port 80, and we have a bunch of lines we don’t care to bother with quite frankly. This is where the pipe comes in.
netstat -anp | grep :80
This will show any traffic that is to port 80, or any traffic that is going to port 80 on a remote server. Lets say we have a huge amount of traffic though, and want to just get a count. If you have a high use server counting by hand is a nuisance at best and virtually impossible at worse. At this point we would just throw the results of our grep into another pipe like this:
netstat -anp | grep :80 | wc -l
And then we have a raw number of accounts used on port 80. Pretty neat. Because pipes are an infinitely versatile tool we can use them for dealing with static files or dealing with the server in real time using utilities like tail. Want to know more about tail? Check out my next blog, I’m going to show some of the tricks on server side troubleshooting.