General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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How to configure ZSH shell to print a timestamp on the right hand side of the prompt line when executing a command? I don't want to display the time prior to executing a command. Here's about how ...
I'm still trying to solve my problem with installing Ruby on a new Mac, and some discussions are saying that I need to reinstall brew because of the change from the old chipset to the M1. (I'm jus...
If I have an email in EML format, how can I determine its spam status from the terminal? My mail provider appears to insert a X-Acme-Spam-Status header. It looks like X-Acme-Spam-Status: v=1; e=b...
On Arch Linux, I installed albert (from AUR) and picom as the compositor. I am using i3 as the window manager. When I bring up the albert window, it is surrounded by the ghost of a window in the b...
I've been met with the phrase RTFM often. I recognize its value. However, the manual pages are often hard to understand and written by people who know so much about the topic at hand that they don'...
I switch between three computers and have never been able to keep my dotfiles in sync. I cannot put them into source control because they contain sensitive data. So, my question is: how do I share ...
~/.config/systemd/user intended purely for units created and managed by the user manually, or are there any automated processes that expect to control it? For example, do packages or programs ever...
I'm trying to containerize an application that currently uses apparmor to confine Python. This allows sandboxing of user-submitted code. How can I get docker and apparmor to play well together? Cu...
I'd like to debug NetworkManager by stepping through it using GDB. I assume I'll have to compile NetworkManager from source to get debug symbols since file /usr/bin/NetworkManager indicates that th...
What is a modern and practical way to handle scheduling tasks on a Linux desktop? Modern means basic features should not rely on obscure or convoluted commands and standards Practical means you...
In i3, is there a way to move an entire workspace to another monitor, including all windows it contains?
I have multiple screens and I often connect and disconnect monitors while the system is running. i3 assigns a workspace to each monitor, but does so unpredictably. Sometimes my main monitor is work...
Let's say I have workspaces 1, 2, 3 on screen A and 4, 5 on screen B. Currently workspaces 1 and 4 are active. With my current config, moving a window to another workspace never activates it. How...
I have multiple screens and I often connect and disconnect monitors while the system is running. i3 assigns a workspace to each monitor, but does so unpredictably. Both workspaces are highlighted a...
I'm trying to run a pipeline to update a PDF after every push to the 'main' branch. I want it to be atomic, so it doesn't touch the existing PDF until it has finished, so I need to use sponge(1) (...
When hardening my system with Lynis I had information about /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net being found weak. Lynis redirects me to Enterprise, which is a paid product and a bit overkill for my home...
My VISUAL setup interferes with my cron jobs. crontab -l works all right, I see my previous jobs. crontab -e, crontab -e -u user-here - opens GVIM on an empty file checked cron.allow or .deny,...
What switches do I need to add to see my video RAM (VRAM) with inxi? inxi -G shows my video card model and other info, but not video RAM.
How can I rescale the Linux virtual terminals (ctrl + alt + {f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6}), so that a high-resolution display doesn't make the letters too small? I'd like to use 1080 or even 720 resolu...
Sorry it was a typo, _ instead of -, that caused the problem. I want to have a key combination to alter the keymaps. It worked with one for us and one for hu, but now I want to use one key combina...
Using For the console: /etc/vconsole.conf ---- KEYMAP=dvorak For X Session: .xinitrc ---- setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak & Problem For the console, it applies the dvorak lay...
Suppose I want to limit what characters are allowed in filenames. For example, I want file creation to fail if there is a \n in the name. Is there a way to enforce this? If it matters, I prefer a...
Is there a way in Ubuntu (22.04) to run a given bash command for a given Key combination in Gnome (42.9)? This Ubuntu is running in Hyper-V on a Win10 host. (I would like to run the setxkbmap us a...
I recently updated Gnome to 1:44.0 and since the update my dark mode settings seem to be ignored for Gnome applications. When setting the dark style in Settings > Appearance, the desktop backgr...
How to open a port when using firewalld as the system firewall?
I compressed some JPEGs with curtail it messed up the filenames. It was supposed to only add -min at the end but ended up adding a random string after the extension 😠: prs@PC:/DOWNLOADS/Pictures$ ...
Suppose I have a PDF which is 2x3 in. I want to create a PDF with a single page, which has multiple copies of this. For example, if the small pieces are in landscape, and the large page is in portr...
When you first connect to a host, ssh asks you about saving its fingerprint. If you do, on subsequent connections it will check the fingerprint and refuse to connect if it changed. I get that this...
I wrote a filter program to overwrite each line with the next one. $ cat /usr/local/bin/ovr #!/bin/sh sed '2,$s/^/\x1B[1A\x1B[K/'; Here's the behavior: $ echo | ovr $ echo 'foo' | ovr ...
I want to generate a list of trending Arch/AUR packages that focuses on user-facing applications rather than background libraries and dependencies. I wrote a script that uses the data from pkgstat...
I'm going to write some systemd services. All of these can only be run if a certain website is up. I thought I could create a ~/.config/systemd/user/website.service this: [Unit] Description=Confi...
MWE To reproduce: Add bindkey -v to your ~/.zshrc. Invoke python interpreter: python. Type something into the prompt without hitting ENTER: this = "this" + "that". Press ESC and try any vim ...
You often have to read man pages to use Linux/Unix software. However, many man pages are not easy to read. They are very long, not always conveniently arranged, and man does not appear to have any ...
I store my address book with abook(1). https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/abook/abook.1.en.html Let's say I want to introduce some contact in some field that accepts the usual name <email>...
A little while ago I was helping someone with running Python in a virtual environment, as root, for some specific purpose. I determined easily enough that this requires explicitly specifying the pa...
Say I have some Bash function my-func, that expects a filename and does some processing on the corresponding file. For demonstration purposes, my-func() { cat "$1"; } If I want to apply that fu...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
I installed the Nvidia container toolkit so I can use GPU acceleration in Docker containers. However, I can't get the containers to work: $ sudo docker run --runtime=nvidia nvidia/cuda:12.2.0-base...
Neomutt (and probably Mutt too, but I didn't try) seems to be hiding header fields from email, such as the Message-ID field, and fields that are added by SMTP servers when they receive the message....
flatpak uninstall --unused currently tells me that there is Nothing unused to uninstall. This seems wrong to me, based on the list of packages I see vs. the "root" packages I explicitly installed p...
From what I can tell, both NixOS and Guix are built around a package manager which, instead of installing package into the "common environment" as is traditional, isolates them to mitigate issues a...
There are many GUI apps on my computer that show up as eg. items in the start menu. When I launch these, what if I want to control how exactly they are launched, such as setting environment variabl...
Spotify runs on my computer with higher DPI (bigger UI elements) than I'd like. How can I reduce it?
How can I search for files on my system? Ideally, I would like to search by various criteria, like date, name, extension, etc.
How do I configure my system so that all GUI apps use a consistent DPI, without configuring each app individually?
I am testing some DHCP stuff, and I want to manually end a lease so I don't have to wait hours for them to expire. How can I do this with OpenWrt?
How do I make my computer request a new IP from DHCP? I am using Arch with NetworkManager.
I have an Arch Linux machine connected to a LAN by ethernet. The router runs OpenWRT. DHCP assigns IPs to this machine like 192.168.1.* - quite typical. I want the IP to always be 192.168.1.10. I...
I am trying to run a DNS server on my LAN. I set it up where: Dnsmasq is the "initial" server that clients see Dnsmasq resolves internal domains, and handles overrides (such as if I want to blo...
