General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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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 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...
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...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
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...
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....
I'm using the Gnome System Monitor in Linux Mint. Whenever I attempt to "End" or "Kill" a process, I am given this warning via a modal dialog (emphasis mine): Killing a process may destroy data,...
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...
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...
How can I search for files on my system? Ideally, I would like to search by various criteria, like date, name, extension, etc.
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...
How do I configure my system so that all GUI apps use a consistent DPI, without configuring each app individually?
Spotify runs on my computer with higher DPI (bigger UI elements) than I'd like. How can I reduce it?
How do I make my computer request a new IP from DHCP? I am using Arch with NetworkManager.
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?
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...
Where can I find documentation on double asterisk in glob expansion? It is discussed in the .gitignore section of Pro Git. It works in ls **/* to list all terminal files. It is supported by py...
I have some bookmarked folders in GtkFileChooserDialog. I want to add these to my dotfiles. Where are the bookmarks stored?
How can I run a command later? I'm looking for a CLI way to schedule a command to be run later. I know that I could create a systemd timer, install it, activate it... That is too much work. I want...
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 have an image (a photo) and I want to highlight certain parts of this. I want to do this from the CLI. I am planning to store the pixel coordinates of polygon vertices in a file, and when I run ...
Guix is a rolling release distro. Another well known rolling release distro is Arch Linux. In Arch, you are expected to frequently do system updates. Partial updates are not supported. In my exper...
For some time pacman used to have a problem where: Occasionally Arch maintainers introduce new GPG keys They start signing packages with the keys Your local pacman doesn't receive these until ...
I like how Guix sounds based on what I've read, and I want to try it. However, my partitioning scheme is a bit complicated. With Guix it appears like my biggest concern is hardware (I will regretta...
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...
After a force shutdown on Ubuntu 22.04, installed on a Lenovo Legion 5, the OS seems to have lost its ability to recognize the built-in touchpad or to connect to the internet. For the backstory......
At the moment GPG only offers the following options when generating a new subkey the with the addkey command: gpg> addkey Please select what kind of key you want: (3) DSA (sign only) (...
SSH agent prints some envar commands for sourcing in a shell. However, these are bash-style, and I use fish. Fish barfs at the bash syntax. How can I fix it?
I have my key added to ssh-agent and they show up in ssh-add -l. When I try to actually SSH to a host that requires the key, I still get prompted for a password. I enter it again and again and it s...
How do you securely erase data from a thumb (USB/flash) drive? With traditional (magnetic/spinny) hard drives, it used to be that you could use various tools to simply overwrite with random data, ...
When formatting drives with Gnome Disks, there is an option to "Erase". The help text says this takes longer, but "completely" erases data. What exactly does this option do? Is there a CLI equival...
I somehow managed to unknowingly change the default app for opening directories on my laptop. E.g. when I use the option open containing folder in a program like Evince, my editor (vscode) opens u...
I have a script that does git fetch for a repository. When I run this in my shell it works fine. I want to run it in a systemd user unit. However, I am using an SSH url, and the systemd unit fails...
I can start services with systemctl start. I can see logs with systemctl status or journalctl. But by the time I run the second the process has already started. I'd like to start a service and imme...
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...
My system occasionally has an issue that looks like this: I run pacman -Syu Many things get updated Many GUI apps (including all display managers and Xorg) start refusing to run and throw up O...
I am using Linux Mint 20.3, with Cinnamon as a window manager. I have a folder named .pytest_cache on my Desktop: $ ls -1A | grep '^\.' .pytest_cache I know that if I open a Nemo window, navi...
I was looking into unlocking my login after too many incorrect password attempts. I found this post about it. Doing faillock -user $(whoami) --reset did indeed unlock the login. However, what exac...
I am running X on Arch Linux without a desktop environment, only i3. Sometimes I need to switch between typing in different languages. How do I switch my keyboard layout?
When I enter the login password incorrectly 3 times, my computer locks me out from attempting a login for 10 minutes. How can I change the timeout?
When I enter the login password incorrectly 3 times, my computer locks me out from attempting a login for 10 minutes. How can I increase the number of attempts?
My goal is to use a french AZERTY keyboard layout with Arch linux and Gnome desktop environment but use US English as "OS language". Note that I am also open to a "working" solution on any other d...
$ echo "4c 6f 72 65 6d 20 69 70 73 75 6d 20 64 6f 6c 6f 72 20 73 69 74 20 61 6d 65 74 2c 20 63 6f 6e 73 65 63 74 65 74 75 72 20 61 64 69 70 69 73 63 69 6e 67 20 65 6c 69 74 2c" | xxd -r orem ipsum...
I want to have a local DNS server on my home LAN, say at 192.168.1.123. All of my machines will use 192.168.1.123 as their only DNS server when connected to my home network. By default, my DNS ser...
I got this message: Bad owner or permissions on /Users/rbiaa065/.ssh/config What should the permissions be to make ssh happy?
Hello everyone, I am encountering an issue when running pytest in my virtual environment. Although I have installed the required modules in my virtual environment using pip, I am still getting a M...
What is the simplest shell idiom for stripping leading and trailing whitespace from a file or program output? Ideally I am looking for the equivalent of trim or strip methods in some languages. Th...
