Posts by Karl Knechtel
which only tells you about a path that would be found in PATH. Often, people who think they have this question have a more general question - i.e., what will be used when the named command is reque...
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,...
My understanding is that one of the key advantages of Linux is modularity: the actual Linux kernel is quite small, and then what we call Linux is that plus the "rest of the system" - hence "operati...
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 unneces...
I am using Linux Mint 20.3, with Cinnamon as a window manager. I have a folder named .pytest_cache on my Desktop: $ ls -1A | grep '^\.' .pytest_cache I know that if I open a Nemo window, navi...
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...
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 practica...
I understand that "mounting" in Linux refers to associating some "device" (usually some storage drive or a partition thereof, but it could be a region of RAM, some memory-mapped hardware, etc.) wit...
I've noticed that the default kernel selection for Ubuntu 22.04, for example, is Linux 5.15.0. Ubuntu 22.04 is a LTS release, which is supposed to have standard support until April 2027, and Linux ...
By memory If you installed Linux yourself, then you were almost certainly informed about this at some point in the process. Generally, you're either expected to choose a separate installer accordi...
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 fu...
Suppose I have a directory structure like ├── src │ ├── folder_a │ │ ├── file_w │ │ └── file_x │ ├── folder_b │ │ ├── file_y │ │ └── file_z and I back it up using rsyn...
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.
Suppose I write a Bash function at the command line: $ hello-world() { echo "Hello, world!"; } and I revise (perhaps hitting up-arrow to retrieve it from command history and edit it) and test a...
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 p...
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 c...
When I use my computer, one question I commonly want to answer for myself is "how much space is being used by the contents of this folder?". Typical file/window managers, IMX, answer this question ...
I have this test setup: $ cat first #!./second one two three $ cat second #!/usr/bin/env python import sys for line in open(sys.argv[1]): print(line, end='') After chmod +x on th...
I have a partition and directory structure that looks like: small partition: / usr var ... # etc. large partition: /home shared other_stuff large_folder ...
Suppose I am the author of a shell utility called bar. One common use case is in pipelines like foo | bar, where foo sometimes runs interactively. I want to distinguish situations where interaction...
Although the system package manager was involved for your setup, this is really just a special case of a pure Python issue. When you run a program like Pytest that is itself written in Python, gen...
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 file...
My primary drive is partitioned basically like so (only roughly to scale): / /home junk v v v |xx###############...
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 ...
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 pa...
