Tip 1. Remove ^M Character
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#col -bx < win_file > unix_file


Tip 2. Add support for USB Keyboard
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If you want to use USB keyboard, edit /boot/device.hints file and add the following line:

hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"

With this option kernel will load usb keyboard driver.


Tip 3. Monitor your hard drive transfer rate
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If you want to monitor your hard drive transfer rate, to find if you have hard drive bottlenecks, use this command:

#iostat -d -n 5 5

Legend: KB/t = kilobytes per transfer
             tps  =   transfers per second
             MB/s =  megabytes per second

Tip 4. Extract username from /etc/passwd
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#cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d ':'
(content of /etc/paddwd is piped to cut command, using -f parameter for field and -d parameter for delimiter string)


Tip 5. Check if a service is running
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For example we want to check if a particular service is running, let's say we want to check that Apache is running, on port 80:

#netstat -ant | grep "*.80 "

Don't forget after .80 to leave a blank space before ", otherwise you will status for all ports that begin with 80. If you want to build a script to check if Apache is started on port 80 (or other http server), you could redirect output to /dev/null, then issue echo $? to see error code, if is 0 then a service is present on port 80, if is 1, nothing is running on port 80.


Tip 6. Replace your boot record
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If you have multiple operating systems to boot from, and you've reinstalled windows box, and you've lost boot menu to choose operation system to boot from you could restore, booting a FreeBSD Live CD (like freesbie for example), then issue boot0cfg command:

boot0cfg -o packet -B -m 0xf ad0

(this will replace your boot sector for ad0 drive with a new one).

Tip 7. Convert a string from lowecase to uppercase (shell programming)
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To convert a string from lower case to upper case do:

echo "this is lowercase" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"

Tip 8. Find a pattern in a file

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To find (for example) ssh keyword in all pkg_descr files from /usr/ports use this:

find /usr/ports -name pkg-descr | xargs cat | grep ssh