matthewsnyder
I am an econometrics researcher, currently living in Seattle, WA. I enjoy all kinds of geeky things!
Posts
See all »Unix is very permissive with filenames, and this can sometimes lead to a bunch of annoying corner cases when printing files. A well known example is when you put a newline in a filename, and it bre...
2 answers · posted 11mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 10mo ago by terdon
How can I view font files, like .ttf, in Linux? I'd like to see a sample of the font (quick brown fox...) and metadata about it (like exact name).
2 answers · posted 11mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 11mo ago by andrew.46
There are several options, like xargs and for. I'll leave those for other answers and only describe my favorite, GNU Parallel. You will have to install it separately, because unlike the inferior xa...
posted 11mo ago by matthewsnyder · edited 11mo ago by matthewsnyder
What you're looking for is called process substitution. In Bash and many bash-like shells, you can use <(foo_command --with --arguments) instead of the file path: diff <(ls /home/alice) <...
posted 11mo ago by matthewsnyder · edited 11mo ago by BryKKan
We are all Linux users and enthusiasts on this site, as well as caring about FOSS. Although technically this is a site for technical Q&A, I think some level of Linux activism is possibly benefi...
3 answers · posted 8mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 6mo ago by LAFK
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...
2 answers · posted 6mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 6mo ago by Basile Starynkevitch
Sometimes I share Unix commands online, and people chastise me for "useless use of cat" (UUOC) or "cat abuse". My cat is quite comfy and doing very well, thank you. What are they talking about?
3 answers · posted 1mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 24d ago by Canina
Suppose I have a list of files on standard input. These may be the output of find, cat filelist.txt or something else. How can I run a command on each file in turn?
5 answers · posted 11mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 26d ago by trueframe
When running sed through fish, I often encounter a problem with regexes. Many commonly used regex control characters like []{}().+ need to be escaped, even if I type the regex in a single quoted st...
2 answers · posted 10mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 10mo ago by terdon
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...
1 answer · posted 8mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 8mo ago by matthewsnyder
My assumption has been that shell-scripting is for scripts only, not interactive usage. Whereas shell is everything else, like interactive usage. I wish we could edit these descriptions to clarify...
posted 6mo ago by matthewsnyder
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...
0 answers · posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder
MySQL is not fully open source and maintained by a corporation which was at one time regarded as very evil (there are much worse ones now). Debian is trying to protect you from yourself by not lett...
posted 10mo ago by matthewsnyder
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...
1 answer · posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 2mo ago by Michael
I've been learning some Linux and I finally feel like I can find my way around the command line. But now I hear people say there are other, "non-POSIX" kinds of shell, with different semantics. Wha...
1 answer · posted 1mo ago by matthewsnyder · last activity 1mo ago by matthewsnyder
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Number of edits made | 73 |
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