Bash is the default system shell. When used as a login shell, it reads several initialization files. Bash processes them in the order they appear in this list:

Make custom settings in ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc. To ensure the correct processing of these files, it is necessary to copy the basic settings from /etc/skel/.profile or /etc/skel/.bashrc into the home directory of the user. It is recommended to copy the settings from /etc/skel after an update. Execute the following shell commands to prevent the loss of personal adjustments:

mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.old
cp /etc/skel/.bashrc ~/.bashrc
mv ~/.profile ~/.profile.old
cp /etc/skel/.profile ~/.profile

Then copy personal adjustments back from the *.old files.

If you want to run commands regularly and automatically in the background at predefined times, cron is the tool to use. cron is driven by specially formatted time tables. Some of of them come with the system and users can write their own tables if needed.

The cron tables are located in /var/spool/cron/tabs. /etc/crontab serves as a systemwide cron table. Enter the username to run the command directly after the time table and before the command. In Example 19.1, “Entry in /etc/crontab”, root is entered. Package-specific tables, located in /etc/cron.d, have the same format. See the cron man page (man cron).

1-59/5 * * * *   root   test -x /usr/sbin/atrun && /usr/sbin/atrun

You cannot edit /etc/crontab by calling the command crontab -e. This file must be loaded directly into an editor, then modified and saved.

A number of packages install shell scripts to the directories /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly, whose execution is controlled by /usr/lib/cron/run-crons. /usr/lib/cron/run-crons is run every 15 minutes from the main table (/etc/crontab). This guarantees that processes that may have been neglected can be run at the proper time.

To run the hourly, daily or other periodic maintenance scripts at custom times, remove the time stamp files regularly using /etc/crontab entries (see Example 19.2, “/etc/crontab: Remove Time Stamp Files”, which removes the hourly one before every full hour, the daily one once a day at 2:14 a.m., etc.).

59 *  * * *     root  rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
14 2  * * *     root  rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily
29 2  * * 6     root  rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly
44 2  1 * *     root  rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly

Or you can set DAILY_TIME in /etc/sysconfig/cron to the time at which cron.daily should start. The setting of MAX_NOT_RUN ensures that the daily tasks get triggered to run, even if the user did not turn on the computer at the specified DAILY_TIME for a longer period of time. The maximum value of MAX_NOT_RUN is 14 days.

The daily system maintenance jobs are distributed to various scripts for reasons of clarity. They are contained in the package aaa_base. /etc/cron.daily contains, for example, the components suse.de-backup-rpmdb, suse.de-clean-tmp or suse.de-cron-local.

There are a number of system services (daemons) that, along with the kernel itself, regularly record the system status and specific events onto log files. This way, the administrator can regularly check the status of the system at a certain point in time, recognize errors or faulty functions and troubleshoot them with pinpoint precision. These log files are normally stored in /var/log as specified by FHS and grow on a daily basis. The logrotate package helps control the growth of these files.

Configure logrotate with the file /etc/logrotate.conf. In particular, the include specification primarily configures the additional files to read. Programs that produce log files install individual configuration files in /etc/logrotate.d. For example, such files ship with the packages, e.g. apache2 (/etc/logrotate.d/apache2) and syslogd (/etc/logrotate.d/syslog).

# see "man logrotate" for details
# rotate log files weekly
weekly

# keep 4 weeks worth of backlogs
rotate 4

# create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones
create

# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
#compress

# RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directory
include /etc/logrotate.d

# no packages own lastlog or wtmp - we'll rotate them here
#/var/log/wtmp {
#    monthly
#    create 0664 root utmp
#    rotate 1
#}

# system-specific logs may be also be configured here.

logrotate is controlled through cron and is called daily by /etc/cron.daily/logrotate.

The create option reads all settings made by the administrator in /etc/permissions*. Ensure that no conflicts arise from any personal modifications.

locate, a command for quickly finding files, is not included in the standard scope of installed software. If desired, install the package findutils-locate. The updatedb process is started automatically every night or about 15 minutes after booting the system.

With the ulimit (user limits) command, it is possible to set limits for the use of system resources and to have these displayed. ulimit is especially useful for limiting available memory for applications. With this, an application can be prevented from co-opting too much of the system resources and slowing or even hanging up the operating system.

ulimit can be used with various options. To limit memory usage, use the options listed in Table 19.1, “ulimit: Setting Resources for the User”.

Systemwide entries can be made in /etc/profile. There, enable creation of core files (needed by programmers for debugging). A normal user cannot increase the values specified in /etc/profile by the system administrator, but can make special entries in ~/.bashrc.

# Limits maximum resident set size (physical memory):
ulimit -m 98304
 
# Limits of virtual memory:
ulimit -v 98304

Memory allocations must be specified in KB. For more detailed information, see man bash.

Not all shells support ulimit directives. PAM (for instance, pam_limits) offers comprehensive adjustment possibilities if you depend on encompassing settings for these restrictions.

The free command is somewhat misleading if your goal is to find out how much RAM is currently being used. That information can be found in /proc/meminfo. These days, users with access to a modern operating systems, such as Linux, should not really need to worry much about memory. The concept of available RAM dates back to before the days of unified memory management. The slogan free memory is bad memory applies well to Linux. As a result, Linux has always made the effort to balance out caches without actually allowing free or unused memory.

Basically, the kernel does not have direct knowledge of any applications or user data. Instead, it manages applications and user data in a page cache. If memory runs short, parts of it are written to the swap partition or to files, from which they can initially be read with the help of the mmap command (see man mmap).

The kernel also contains other caches, such as the slab cache, where the caches used for network access are stored. This may explain the differences between the counters in /proc/meminfo. Most, but not all, of them can be accessed via /proc/slabinfo.

For some GNU applications (such as tar), the man pages are no longer maintained. For these commands, use the --help option to get a quick overview of the info pages, which provide more in-depth instructions. Info is GNU's hypertext system. Read an introduction to this system by entering info info. Info pages can be viewed with Emacs by entering emacs -f info or directly in a console with info. You can also use tkinfo, xinfo or the help system to view info pages.

With man man_page you normally display a man page for instant reading. Now, if a man page with the same name exists in different sections, man prompts the user, the page from which section shall be made visible. The user is then expected to type the section as the answer.

If you want to return to the previous behavior, set MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in a shell initialization file such as ~/.bashrc.

GNU Emacs is a complex work environment. The following sections cover the configuration files processed when GNU Emacs is started. More information is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/.

On start-up, Emacs reads several files containing the settings of the user, system administrator and distributor for customization or preconfiguration. The initialization file ~/.emacs is installed to the home directories of the individual users from /etc/skel. .emacs, in turn, reads the file /etc/skel/.gnu-emacs. To customize the program, copy .gnu-emacs to the home directory (with cp /etc/skel/.gnu-emacs ~/.gnu-emacs) and make the desired settings there.

.gnu-emacs defines the file ~/.gnu-emacs-custom as custom-file. If users make settings with the customize options in Emacs, the settings are saved to ~/.gnu-emacs-custom.

With openSUSE, the emacs package installs the file site-start.el in the directory /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp. The file site-start.el is loaded before the initialization file ~/.emacs. Among other things, site-start.el ensures that special configuration files distributed with Emacs add-on packages, such as psgml, are loaded automatically. Configuration files of this type are located in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp, too, and always begin with suse-start-. The local system administrator can specify systemwide settings in default.el.

More information about these files is available in the Emacs info file under Init File: info:/emacs/InitFile. Information about how to disable the loading of these files (if necessary) is also provided at this location.

The components of Emacs are divided into several packages:

You should always set the language and country codes together. Language settings follow the standard ISO 639 available at http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso639/iso639-en.html and http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/. Country codes are listed in ISO 3166 available at http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/en_listp1.html.

It only makes sense to set values for which usable description files can be found in /usr/lib/locale. Additional description files can be created from the files in /usr/share/i18n using the command localedef. The description files are part of the glibc-i18ndata package. A description file for en_US.UTF-8 (for English and United States) can be created with:

localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

SuSEconfig reads the variables in /etc/sysconfig/language and writes the necessary changes to /etc/SuSEconfig/profile and /etc/SuSEconfig/csh.cshrc. /etc/SuSEconfig/profile is read or sourced by /etc/profile. /etc/SuSEconfig/csh.cshrc is sourced by /etc/csh.cshrc. This makes the settings available systemwide.

Users can override the system defaults by editing their ~/.bashrc accordingly. For instance, if you do not want to use the systemwide en_US for program messages, include LC_MESSAGES=es_ES so that messages are displayed in Spanish instead.

If you are not satisfied with locale system defaults, change the settings in ~/.i18n according to the Bash scripting syntax. Entries in ~/.i18n override system defaults from /etc/sysconfig/language. Use the same variable names but without the RC_ namespace prefixes. For example, use LANG instead of RC_LANG:

LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=C

Files in the category Messages are, as a rule, only stored in the corresponding language directory (like en) to have a fallback. If you set LANG to en_US and the message file in /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES does not exist, it falls back to /usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES.

A fallback chain can also be defined, for example, for Breton to French or for Galician to Spanish to Portuguese:

LANGUAGE="br_FR:fr_FR"

LANGUAGE="gl_ES:es_ES:pt_PT"

If desired, use the Norwegian variants Nynorsk and Bokmål instead (with additional fallback to no):

LANG="nn_NO"

LANGUAGE="nn_NO:nb_NO:no"

or

LANG="nb_NO"

LANGUAGE="nb_NO:nn_NO:no"

Note that in Norwegian, LC_TIME is also treated differently.

One problem that can arise is a separator used to delimit groups of digits not being recognized properly. This occurs if LANG is set to only a two-letter language code like de, but the definition file glibc uses is located in /usr/share/lib/de_DE/LC_NUMERIC. Thus LC_NUMERIC must be set to de_DE to make the separator definition visible to the system.