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Posts by matthewsnyder‭

80 posts
83%
+8 −0
Q&A Are there any legitimate uses for newlines in filenames?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by terdon‭

Question filesystem
77%
+5 −0
Q&A How do I view fonts?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by andrew.46‭

Question arch-linux fonts
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Q&A When a command takes filenames as argument, how can I avoid creating temporary files?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by BryKKan‭

Answer
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Q&A How do you troubleshoot bwrap/wine sandboxes for Windows games?

I use Wine to play Windows games. As is well known: Wine is not a sandbox Windows games are proprietary blobs and can contain malware Windows malware can potentially harm Linux through Wine ...

1 answer  ·  posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by r~~‭

Question wine
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+3 −0
Q&A Increase incorrect login attempts before locking account

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?

2 answers  ·  posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 2mo ago by r~~‭

Question arch-linux password
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Q&A Can I enter raw strings in fish to avoid escaping regexes for sed?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by terdon‭

71%
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Q&A How to install mysql-server on Debian?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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Q&A What unexpected things can happen if a user runs commands expecting a text file on input lacking a file-final newline?

I tried to think of some for a while, but couldn't find any good ones. That said, there's plenty of programs I don't know. For reference: $ echo -en "hello\nworld" | tee 1.txt | bat -A ───────┬──...

posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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+2 −0
Q&A How do I tweak the start parameters of GUI apps?

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 13d ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 13d ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Q&A Where does GtkFileChooserDialog store bookmarks?

I have some bookmarked folders in GtkFileChooserDialog. I want to add these to my dotfiles. Where are the bookmarks stored?

1 answer  ·  posted 24d ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 24d ago by Quasímodo‭

Question dotfiles
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+2 −0
Q&A Highlight regions in an image with CLI

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 ...

2 answers  ·  posted 1mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by samcarter‭

66%
+2 −0
Q&A What does the "Valid" column mean in the output of "faillock"?

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...

1 answer  ·  posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 2mo ago by AdminBee‭

Question arch-linux password
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+2 −0
Q&A How do I set up my own DNS on my LAN, with delegation of public domains?

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...

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

Question dns
66%
+2 −0
Meta How can we grow this community?

Don't answer too many questions Avoid major tag gaps Keep the front page lively. My armchair analysis is that the funnel for this site is like this: User gets linked from internet search ...

posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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Q&A Why do many Windows games fail when the network is sandboxed?

I run Windows games with Wine, and use bwrap to sandbox them. I've noticed that passing --unshare-net to disable the network breaks many, many games (they fail to start with no obvious error messag...

0 answers  ·  posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by Mithical‭

Question networking wine
66%
+2 −0
Q&A How to convert Flac to Mp3 with FFmpeg?

I see that this is self-answered, but I disagree that the answer provided is the best way. The best way is to properly utilize the Unix philosophy, by decomposing the problem into simpler sub-probl...

posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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Q&A How to run a command on a list of files?

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 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
66%
+2 −0
Q&A How to run a command on a list of files?

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?

2 answers  ·  posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by AdminBee‭

Question shell-scripting
62%
+3 −1
Q&A Simplest way of stripping leading/trailing whitespace from file or program output

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...

3 answers  ·  posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 2mo ago by AdminBee‭

Question text-processing
62%
+3 −1
Meta Decomposing compound questions

The basis of the Unix philosophy is to decompose complex tasks into simple sub-tasks, so that one can easily choose a combination of simple Unix tools to solve the problem in an intuitive way. Oft...

0 answers  ·  posted 3mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Question discussion
60%
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Q&A Increase incorrect login attempts before locking account

This appears to be set by the option deny in /etc/security/faillock.conf.

posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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Q&A GUI apps stop working until next boot after some system upgrades

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...

1 answer  ·  posted 2mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 2mo ago by mr Tsjolder‭

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Q&A How to change the default app for opening directories in Gnome?

I don't use Gnome, but I'm guessing it relies on xdg-open to figure out what program to use. Your first step would be to do xdg-open ~ to see if it uses the same incorrect program. If so, great - ...

posted 1mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
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Q&A Ergonomic way to search man pages

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 ...

2 answers  ·  posted 1mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by r~~‭

Question man-page
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+1 −0
Q&A How do I find files?

How can I search for files on my system? Ideally, I would like to search by various criteria, like date, name, extension, etc.

1 answer  ·  posted 13d ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 13d ago by matthewsnyder‭

Question shell file