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Activity for Karl Knechtel‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Answer A: Best practice for splitting data between a fast and slow drive
First, consider your needs. There's a decent chance that everything you want will fit on the SSD anyway, at least if you aren't an enthusiastic multimedia collector. Nowadays a 1TB SSD can be had cheaply and is likely a much better value for money than a 500GB one; and drives smaller than that are so...
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291771 Re "making sure to preserve the permissions", is ordinary `mv` not sufficient? Also, what exactly is the "r" in "rbind"?
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6 months ago
Edit Post #291766 Initial revision 6 months ago
Question Adding mount points to an existing partition that already has one
I have `/` mounted on a relatively small partition and `/home` on a larger one taking up most of the rest of the drive (as seems to be common practice). I'd like to move certain other parts of the filesystem onto the main partition - notably: `/var` (especially `/var/log`), since it tends to grow...
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291641 As far as I'm aware, a `.desktop` file can be used anywhere on the filesystem; it's just that putting it in certain locations might offer additional special treatment (e.g. making it available in the DE's "start menu" equivalent). Is there really some limitation I've managed not to notice?
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291597 GNOME also offers a "System Monitor" application, which comes pre-installed in Linux Mint (at least with Cinnamon). The "start menu" equivalent in this case will list this entry and it can be searched for as "system monitor" and also as "task manager" (for discoverability by users switching from Wind...
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291467 These differences are mostly intentional: we want to de-emphasize comments in a way that Stack Overflow failed to do (resulting in clutter that puts more space between answers); and we want people to consider the question text (not just the title) before voting - because votes aren't just about "shou...
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7 months ago
Comment Post #291408 Do you mean that the output will include spaces after the filename (which don't appear to have been reproduced here), or simply that they appear *between* the hash and the filename? Are you specifically trying to highlight that there are *two* spaces in between, or just what?
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7 months ago
Edit Post #282891 Post edited:
Attempt to rephrase the question so that existing answers are still applicable, but so that it can be answered more objectively.
7 months ago
Comment Post #291302 (Of course, it occurs to me that even if setting up a full `chroot` environment weren't necessary, I would *at least* have to mount the new root partition in the live system so as to have access to *its* `/etc/fstab` (rather than that of the live boot)...)
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8 months ago
Comment Post #291302 I'm pretty sure the system is using UEFI and GPT, and the bootloader should be GRUB2. I had hoped that I would *only* need to edit `/etc/fstab` or similar files, but it's good to see that there is at least a viable approach to this. To be clear: I infer that the point of mounting a temporary setup...
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8 months ago
Edit Post #291300 Initial revision 8 months ago
Question Moving the filesystem root to a different partition and booting from it
My primary drive is partitioned basically like so (only roughly to scale): ``` / /home junk v v v |xx############################################xxx ^ ^ ...
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8 months ago
Edit Post #291264 Post edited:
improve clarity and fix some typos in stride
8 months ago
Suggested Edit Post #291264 Suggested edit:
improve clarity and fix some typos in stride
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helpful 8 months ago
Comment Post #291214 Thanks for the comprehensive overview. It makes perfect sense to me. I went in to this thinking that I wouldn't want to upgrade the entire OS more than every 4 or 5 years anyway, but it feels like I pay a heavy price in terms of software versions being much further out of date than I expected, and...
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8 months ago
Edit Post #291212 Initial revision 8 months ago
Question Why/how can distro support lifetimes exceed the lifetime of their dependencies (such as Python)?
Motivating example: my Mint 20.3 distribution offers long-term support until April 2025, which matches the "standard support" offered for the upstream Ubuntu (20.04 "Jammy Jellyfish"). However, the system-provided Python version is 3.8, which reaches the end of security support this October, half a y...
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8 months ago
Comment Post #291205 It's not really clear to me what harm could actually be caused by doing this, if it's possible. Could you describe a more detailed scenario of concern in the question?
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8 months ago
Edit Post #291157 Initial revision 8 months ago
Answer A: What is cat abuse/useless use of cat?
Overview A "useless use" or "abuse" of `cat` occurs when a Unix pipeline (sequence of commands that feed into each other, using the shell `|` or "pipe" operator) includes a call to `cat` that is unnecessary for solving the problem. Such pipelines are naturally less efficient (since the OS has t...
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8 months ago
Edit Post #291149 Initial revision 8 months ago
Question Group and users seem to disagree about whether the users are in the group
On my current setup (running Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon), I have an administrative user and several ordinary users. I intend for all of these users to be in the same group, which happens to have the same name as the admin user name. (After doing the basic guided setup and looking up some tutorials, I u...
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8 months ago
Comment Post #290163 Are return codes for intermediate steps in the pipeline relevant and/or accessible in the first place?
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9 months ago
Suggested Edit Post #282891 Suggested edit:
Attempt to rephrase the question so that existing answers are still applicable, but so that it can be answered more objectively.
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helpful 9 months ago
Edit Post #291090 Initial revision 9 months ago
Answer A: Is there a way to automatically normalize paths when extracting RARs?
If all else fails, you could create a wrapper shell function to check the output of `unrar l` (probably by piping to `wc -l`) and proceed accordingly.
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9 months ago
Edit Post #290631 Post edited:
Improve fake `tree` output
10 months ago
Comment Post #290636 My actual use case involves mostly large binary files. I have a vague recollection of using Unison on Windows many years ago; I think I must have assumed that it only existed to replace `rsync`. But now I've seen that Unison is used on Linux for good reason, and also that `rsync` builds exist for Win...
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10 months ago
Edit Post #290631 Initial revision 10 months ago
Question Can rsync handle moves and renames?
Suppose I have a directory structure like ``` ├── src │   ├── foldera │   │   ├── filew │   │   └── filex │   ├── folderb │   │   ├── filey │   │   └── filez ``` and I back it up using `rsync`: ``` $ rsync -r /path/to/src/ /path/to/dst/ ``` Later, I reorganize the contents of `src`, f...
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10 months ago
Comment Post #289798 This makes it feel like my original question is "a typo" by the reasoning I would normally apply - but I sense that there's the working of a more general principle here that could be written up in a better designed Q&A. I also notice, for example, that `sudo whoami && whoami` gives my own username...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289796 Initial revision about 1 year ago
Question How does the root user locate executables?
A little while ago I was helping someone with running Python in a virtual environment, as root, for some specific purpose. I determined easily enough that this requires explicitly specifying the path to the virtual environment's Python executable (which to some extent defeats the purpose of the "virt...
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about 1 year ago
Comment Post #289794 I realize now that I had originally been thinking in terms of `xargs` because of a previous wrapper I made, to identify files to tally with `wc` (which needs a single invocation with all the arguments, in order to get the sum, of course). I went back and fixed that to use `-print0` / `-0` at least.
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about 1 year ago
Comment Post #289794 This is brilliant; I had a feeling (after realizing the issue in my first attempt at the question) that `xargs` was complicating things given that `find` has a `-exec` argument. This really allowed me to get my head around the needed quoting schemes, too, and explains general best practices (I am not...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289792 Post edited:
Fix example for the starting point; fix attempt to match and explain issues with this attempt
about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289792 Question closed about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289792 Initial revision about 1 year ago
Question Higher-order functions in Bash?
Say I have some Bash function `my-func`, that expects a filename and does some processing on the corresponding file. For demonstration purposes, ``` my-func() { cat "$1"; } ``` If I want to apply that function to all the text files in the current directory, I eventually figured out that I can d...
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about 1 year ago
Comment Post #289772 (It looks like you've already considered this, but.) While I'm interested in this task and agree that there's at least an *intuitive* distinction to be drawn between libraries and applications, I'm not sure that there's a rigorous way to defined that distinction that's good enough for a programmat...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289736 Initial revision about 1 year ago
Question How can I get a Flatpak dependency graph?
`flatpak uninstall --unused` currently tells me that there is `Nothing unused to uninstall`. This seems wrong to me, based on the list of packages I see vs. the "root" packages I explicitly installed plus what I think their dependencies should be. Is there any way I can get Flatpak to show me a gr...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289684 Initial revision about 1 year ago
Answer A: Suggestion: Basic Linux skills compendium
I've been persistently advocating for an analogous effort in the Software community, and generally think that any Codidact community could likely benefit from doing something similar. As a practical matter, everything that can meaningfully be "mastered" has far more beginner practitioners than expert...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #289683 Initial revision about 1 year ago
Question What are the concrete security risks of forcibly terminating a process?
I'm using the Gnome System Monitor in Linux Mint. Whenever I attempt to "End" or "Kill" a process, I am given this warning via a modal dialog (emphasis mine): > Killing a process may destroy data, break the session or introduce a security risk. Only unresponsive processes should be killed. (Sim...
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about 1 year ago
Suggested Edit Post #289541 Suggested edit:
attempt to clarify
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declined over 1 year ago
Comment Post #289541 Based on the answer that "worked for" you, it seems that I did have the right "bookmarks" in mind. You can create these in other ways, for example by using ctrl-D in Nemo while a window is focused. (There is an [outstanding bug report](https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2921) for Nemo, whereby ...
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over 1 year ago
Comment Post #289541 ... Because they persist between uses of the dialog? And because, at least in Nemo, I can see bookmarks in the left-hand panel of the file browser windows? If you had a different kind of bookmark in mind, then I don't understand what it is and the question would probably be better of with an explicit...
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over 1 year ago