Posts by matthewsnyder
The existing answer is good, but I'll add a short version. man FOO is the most reliable way. A large majority of programs have a man page, and a large majority of man pages cover all aspects of ...
Is it practical to use libostree for user files? Or is it too specialized for tracking an entire OS? I am not familiar with libostree, but sounds like it's "Git for filesystem trees". Seems like t...
Gnome disks can create a disk image, and then restore it to the new one. The new drive has to be same size or larger, although this is obvious. If it is larger, the partition will still be small, ...
Do any of the cron implementations allow you to manually trigger cron jobs (stuff in your crontab) right now, in the exact same manner as they would have when triggered on their usual schedule, exc...
/dev/random is a stream of every possible value. You're supposed to filter it to take the ones you want. This is efficient, although if the values you want are such that only, say, 1% of what comes...
Of course every language has some kind of random library... But can you generate custom random strings with just basic CLI tools? For example, we have /dev/random which provides a stream of random...
No wonder it's hard to find good programs - it's no longer necessary! At some point this became a built in part of Xorg via xinput. The process is something like this: xinput list and find the ...
I use unrar to extract rar archives sometimes: UNRAR 6.24 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2023 Alexander Roshal Sometimes the archive root has several files, so if I do unrar x foo.rar it will...
I'm not an expert on this at all, but so far there are no answers, so I'll try one. "Synchronization" is in the context of multithreading. For those who don't know how multithreading works: Multi...
In Unix systems like Linux, some commands are considered dangerous and only the root user can run them. Normally, you don't login as root. So when you want to run dangerous commands, you must first...
Piper can be used for this. All mice supported by Piper (actually libratbag) are a result of the community reverse engineering the mouse protocol. It will not support all mice, but only selected on...
Some pacman functions require sudo. When I forget the sudo, you get: error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root. I then have to press the keys: up, home, s, u, d, o, space, en...
In case Ipify stops being free: https://dnsleaktest.com/ will show you your IP. I don't know if they have an API, but it's easy to parse the HTML: https dnsleaktest.com | rg '\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+' -...
~/.config/systemd/user intended purely for units created and managed by the user manually, or are there any automated processes that expect to control it? For example, do packages or programs ever...
The systemd manual gives a list of path where systemd looks for unit files. However, I want to isolate my units in a path of my own choosing. Is it possible to configure systemd to add some path t...
Historically, cron was the main way to schedule tasks on Linux. Briefly, there will be some file like /etc/crontab which will contain one line for each task. The line starts with a schedule string ...
The standard way to schedule tasks in most Linux systems nowadays is to use systemd timers. This requires writing a systemd timer config file, which has syntax similar to INI. This is summarized i...
I noticed that downloading all the pacman packages for a full system install takes a lot of time, so I want to create a systemd time that will periodically download them for me. That way, most of t...
Windows packages all of its API functions into DLLs, so when you have a program that relies on calls to X, Y and Z you must ensure that you have the correct set of DLLs that provide all of those. T...
This appears to be set by the option unlock_time in /etc/security/faillock.conf.
When I enter the login password incorrectly 3 times, my computer locks me out from attempting a login for 10 minutes. How can I change the timeout?
Vim has multiple "registers", which in modern parlance is multiple internal clipboards. By default, yank sends to an anonymous register, which is separate from the clipboard. However, you can make...
I'll post this as an example of what I'm looking to do. The following script: import sys a = sys.stdin.read() b = a.strip() c = map(lambda s: s.strip(), b.splitlines()) for s in c: p...
Although you have left a post saying it is solved, I think it's not uncommon for this kind of problem to show up. I think it can happen due to misconfiguration of either NM or the network drivers/h...
This can be done with Wine Bottles. Install flatpak from your package manager. Install Bottles from Flatpak (may show up as Discover (Software Center)) May take a while, because it has many ...
