Hope you enjoy these humorous commands. Go ahead and try them, they really do work.

% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% "How would you rate Quayle's incompetence?
Unmatched ".

% Unmatched ".
Unmatched ".

% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].

% ^How did the sex change operation go?^
Modifier failed.

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.

% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.

% sleep with me
bad character

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

% %blow
%blow: No such job.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink matter
matter: cannot create

Sometimes you need to execute a command as another user to test newly installed or configured software. For instance, if you just installed snort you want to make sure it’s going to run ok as the snort user. It’s relatively simple.

su username -c command

So if you wanted to execute a backups script called backup.sh as the user named backupadmin then you would type:

su backupadmin -c backup.sh

Looking to start learning the CLI (Command Line Interface) in Linux… start with these. These are the very very basics, so if you’re already pretty familiar with Linux, read no further.
Click to continue »