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Although there are different methods for backing up MySQL and MariaDB databases, the most common and effective one is to use a native tool that both MySQL and MariaDB make available for this purpose: the mysqldump command. As its name suggests, this is a command-line executable program that allows you to perform a complete export (dump) of all the contents of a database or even all the databases in a running MySQL or MariaDB instance. Of course it also allows partial backups, i.e. only some specific tables, or even only only a subset of all the records in a table.

The .xsession-errors file is where the X Window system logs all errors that occur within the Linux graphical environment. All desktop environments, whether Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE, etc., and all lighter window managers like FVWM, IceWM or Window Maker make use of the X Window system. Therefore any graphical application running on your computer can cause that error messages are written to the .xsession-errors file, reason why it can grow wildly until reaching very big sizes of tens of GB or even hundreds if your disk capacity allows it.

It is usually easy to know which process or processes are writing to a given file in Linux, since we either know its origin and its nature beforehand (for example the Apache access_log), or we can easily find it out with the fuser or lsof commands. However, sometimes it will happen that although we know the role and purpose of a file, there are so many applications accesing it simultaneously that it is very difficult to know which of them is the one that reads/writes the most or does so in a precise moment. Knowing this would be very useful to learn for example why a log file is growing excessively or which application is making an abusive use of system resources, either by mistake or intentionally.

One of the most common and tedious tasks of a sysadmin is to prevent file systems become completely full, because when a server runs out of space the consequences are unpredictable. Depending on how you structured the root file system and if it is divided into different partitions or volumes, those consequences will be more or less severe, but in any case undesirable.

In any case it is always better to be safe than sorry, so use tools that perform automatic log rotation as logrotate and custom scripts to monitor and conduct periodic emptying actions to prevent file systems to get full. However, still using these prevention methods it is for sure it will be many times when you will have to act manually to troubleshoot problems.

The simplest and shortest method to measure the number of processors present on a Linux box, which is also widely extended as it’s part of coreutils is:

Another way to get the same result which also allows us to obtain additional information from our processor are the lscpu command:

Or we can examine the cpuinfo file from /proc filesystem:

There are many additional details about these processors in /proc/cpuinfo file, including the CPU model and number of cores: