How to use grep (with examples)

The grep command is one of the oldest tools for Linux and other platforms. Actually, it is older than Linux itself. It was written by Ken Thompson more than 45 years ago! The nameĀ grep stands for “globally regular expression print”. This name comes from its predecessor ed and the specific mode in which you would globally search, using a regular expression, and print the output. The related command was “g/re/p”. For more history, have a look at the Wikipedia entry. […]

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Linux capabilities 101

Security of Linux systems and applications can be greatly improved by using hardening measures. One of these measures is called Linux capabilities. Capabilities are supported by the kernel for some while now. Using capabilities we can strengthenĀ applications and containers. Unfortunately, this powerful tool is still underutilized. Time to change that! This article helps to understand and apply them. What are Linux capabilities? Normally the root user (or any ID with UID of 0) gets a special treatment when running processes. […]

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How to use Lynis

How to use Lynis This article explains in a few quick steps how to start with using Lynis. A more extensive explanation can be found in the documentation of Lynis. Download Lynis: wget http://cisofy.com/files/lynis-version.tar.gz Unpack tarball: tar xfvz lynis-version.tar.gz This will unpack the tarball with a Lynis directory. Go into this directory: cd lynis-version When running Lynis for the very first time, just just the -c parameter. It will start the audit process and pauses after every batch of tests. […]

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