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...
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).
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...
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?
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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 ...
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 can I remap buttons on my mouse, especially for more exotic ones like MMO mice?
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?
My thoughts on the matter are clear from the question, but I'll add some example topics that could be covered by this "basics compendium": A "curriculum" of sorts that lists all the basic topics...
How do I make my computer request a new IP from DHCP? I am using Arch with NetworkManager.
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?
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 ───────┬──...
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...
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...
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 ...
Restarting NetworkManager should be enough: sudo systemctl restart NetworkManger
