matthewsnyder‭

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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y 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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by andrew.46‭

I have a static website I serve with Caddy. The Caddy is inside a container. I notice that occasionally I get malicious requests, looking at the paths requested. Some examples are: /cgi-bin/luc...

1 answer  ·  posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by GeraldS‭

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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1y 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) &lt...

posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1y 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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y 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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y 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 8mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Canina‭

If I had a fast drive (SSD) and a slow one (HDD), what parts of my Linux system should go on the fast one?

1 answer  ·  posted 5mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 5mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y 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 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

How can I print the version of a program in the terminal, so that I know which one I have installed?

3 answers  ·  posted 6mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 5mo ago by alx‭

Suppose I have some hypothetical CLI program. It is important that only one instance of this program runs at any given time. When multiple instances run concurrently, bad things happen. Normally, ...

2 answers  ·  posted 4mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 4mo ago by Canina‭

Sometimes I work with Git repos that have some changes fetched but not yet merged to the local branch. Occasionally I make commits without noticing this, which necessitates rebase/conflict resoluti...

1 answer  ·  posted 4mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 4mo ago by Michael‭

Online, I often see someone tell people to run a command like /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" (example from https://brew.sh/). The g...

2 answers  ·  posted 4mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by Stephen Kitt‭