General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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I use unrar to extract rar archives sometimes: UNRAR 6.24 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2023 Alexander Roshal Sometimes the archive root has several files, so if I do unrar x foo.rar it will...
I am trying to run Solr 9.5.0 on Windows Subsystem For Linux 2. It crashes with a Segmentation Fault and does not start. I can run it on Windows without an issue. Java version on WSL2: 17 Java ve...
BTRFS is capable of spanning over multiple drives. How to add one more to an existing filesystem?
TASK I am coding up ebooks to a specific standard, and have a script that converts a string into the correct titlecase for this publisher. When working with some public domain source files, one of...
I want to connect to my university network via OpenVPN under Fedora GNOME. I imported the openvpn configuration provided by the university in the Network Manager GUI and specified the user certifi...
Desktop files always have either %u or %U as an argument for the program being launched. E.g. here's a line from my firefox.desktop: Exec=/usr/lib/firefox/firefox %u What does it mean?
For reasons of my own, I have services on my LAN which use HTTPS and I create my own certificates for these. Over the years, the usage of TLS has evolved considerably. Many features that were once...
How does the init process play a role in the booting of Linux?
ip a command will conveniently show the addresses assigned to your network interfaces, but oftentimes this is not what the internet sees your machine as. So how to find your public IP address from...
I am trying to debug an issue with audio playback in MuseScore. During this process, I realised that I had/have no clue about audio playback in Linux (or in general for that matter). I already le...
On a default Arch install, faillock makes it so that if you enter the sudo password wrong too many times, even the correct password will be rejected until the timer is up. At the same time, you ca...
How to ignore server certificate when using ldapsearch command-line tool? Of course this isn't something you should be doing regularly, but it would be a handy asset for troubleshooting.
Sometimes your programs fail because the network port they are trying to use is already in use by some other process. How to find out what this other process is?
Wine has options for "Synchronization", like "Esync" or "Fsync". What do these actually do? What is the purpose of such an option? What is the impact to normal usage of a Windows program in Wine?
Some pacman functions require sudo. When I forget the sudo, you get: error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root. I then have to press the keys: up, home, s, u, d, o, space, en...
Why does Linux use the sudo command?
How can a file list be manually filtered with a gitignore file. I want to do the equivalent of git ls-files, but it should work even if I remove .git, so I can't use git(1). Currently, I'm doing ...
Suppose I have a directory structure like ├── src │ ├── folder_a │ │ ├── file_w │ │ └── file_x │ ├── folder_b │ │ ├── file_y │ │ └── file_z and I back it up using rsyn...
I don't know what these things are called exactly in the Linux world. But there is the concept of a drive in RAM, to write files onto and read them like it was any disk drive. There is also the c...
Problem How do I find product and vendor names for use with a xorg.conf file? Neither the xorg.conf nor the xinput manuals specify how to do this. xinput lists info, but the output lacks column ...
How to lookup user-id with the user's name? E.g. What's the UID of user linus?
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 ...
