Posts by 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...
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...
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?
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).
If I had a fast drive (SSD) and a slow one (HDD), what parts of my Linux system should go on the fast one?
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...
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...
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...
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) <...
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...
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 ...
When I do rg foo /bar/baz/, ripgrep will search for foo in all files under /bar/baz/. For every file that has matching lines, it will print each line with its line number, highlight the matching pa...
Objectively, the most accurate way would be to actually count the lines. So you would do wc on each file and add them up. This ends up being not a very useful statistic, because it is sensitive to...
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...
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...
A lot of games are made for Windows, and don't have an official Linux version. Can you play these on Linux? Asking specifically about games, not all programs, because games have a lot of additiona...
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, ...
How can I print the version of a program in the terminal, so that I know which one I have installed?
Occasionally I ask how to do some configuration, and people tell me to do stuff like edit some config file in an XYZ directory. But if I configure everything this way, it will turn into a mess, and...
I want to switch hard drives. How do I migrate my root FS from the drive it's on, to the new one, so that everything is exactly as it is?
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
