You’re probably familiar with dir, the windows command which lists all files in a certain directory. If you ever find the need (as I have) to recursively list every file in a directory, as well as all its sub-directories, you can do this by setting a couple of parameters on the dir command. dir /s /b Warning: This will output a lot of stuff, so I’d recommend piping the… Read More »Recursively list all files in Windows

A handy little command for checking the history of all commands executed through the UNIX command prompt for that user. history This will return you a numbered list of commands, oldest first. Note that by default, “history” will NOT show you timestamps, which can be very handy if investigating activity on a certain machine. To show history with timestamps, you’ll need to set up an evironment variable to store the… Read More »Showing command history in UNIX with timestamps

 A few times over the course of working with Oracle, I’ve come across environments which had issues making connections to databases set up across a network. These were failing with the error “ORA-12514: No TNS Listener”. I eventually found that to fix this, you need to follow the steps below: Install the Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) on the machine attempting to make the connection Navigate to C:\app\<username>\product\<oracle_version>\client_1\Network\Admin\Sample (note that this… Read More »How to fix Oracle TNS Listener Issues

I found myself having to search through the contents of a bunch of files in Unix the other day, and wanted to find a command to do it for me. Cue some Googling, and I found exactly what I was looking for here. find . -name “*” -exec grep -l “somestring” {} \;