Today is going to be a practical tip. If you’re managing many Unix systems, sooner or later you come across files with special characters - they can’t be deleted with rm command using standard approach and require a bit of trickery to be successfully removed.
Examples of files with special characters
Any language apart from English will [...]
Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it’s a new version of Firefox, or a cool game, or a video editing package, there comes a time when you want to make your system do more than it can do now.
Under Linux, installing new applications isn’t a particularly hard [...]
Alias is a command that lets you create command aliases, it is very useful when you usually use commands with options.
As an example in my case I use a lot these commands
du -h
and
df -h
In both cases the “-h” option makes the output be in Kbytes or Mbytes instead of bytes, so it is more [...]
If you need to start a program from the command line, and want to recover the command prompt, just add the & symbol to the command.
Example.
Read more at go2linux.org
On my PC I have installed, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Sabayon and Debian (my main Linux operating system), but when I turn it on, usually I did not get the grub menu, and I am forwarded directly to Debian, sometimes I have to restart the system to start another Linux flavor.
So, the solution was to put [...]
I screwed up my Ubuntu desktop. I accidentally deleted the panels and the icons on my Ubuntu desktop. The whole desktop is messed up, I can’t figure out how to restore it?
After googling around, I found a solution how to fix this mess. To restore the Desktop settings, just run these command in the console:
Read [...]
Familiarity with command prompts and shell scripts is still necessary if you want to get the most from your GNU/Linux system, but the less time you spend doing that the better, right? Two powerful ways to minimize your time at the command line are shell aliases and functions.
The examples that follow are for the bash [...]
To mount a Samba share when Linux system comes up after reboot edit the /etc/fstab file and put entry as follows for your Windows/Samba share:
Read more at TuxTraining
The following tweaks assume that you are using an ext3 filesystem for your Ubuntu OS and they will offer a noticeable performance boost! However, there is also a bad side of them… if you don’t have an UPS and your system will power off accidentally or because of a power loss, YOU WILL LOSE IMPORTANT [...]
If you ever need to download an entire Web site, perhaps for off-line viewing, wget can do the
job—for example:
$ wget \
Read more at Linux Journal
I’ve been using Firefox’s fullscreen mode on my Eee PC to get the maximum amount of vertical screen space possible. I noticed that the screen flickers black briefly whenever a tooltip or right click menu is displayed. All fullscreen applications seem to be affected.
This bug can be worked around by changing an advanced Compiz setting [...]
The contents of /etc/motd are displayed by login after a successful login but just before it executes the login shell.
The abbreviation “motd” stands for “message of the day”, and this file has been traditionally used for exactly that (it requires much less disk space than mail to all users).
If you want to change this message [...]
Here is a quick one line command to generate a random password from the Linux command line.
# < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c8
Read more at Tux Training
The San Francisco-based company announced the details of gOS 3 Gadgets, the newest version of its Linux operating system for consumers, this month. The main feature of gOS 3 Gadgets is its ability to instantly launch Google Gadgets for Linux on start-up, allowing users access to more than 100,000 iGoogle and Google Gadgets applications.
The new [...]
xargs is an incredibly useful command: it takes in input and executes your chosen command on it: xargs command. Deceptively simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. It’s most commonly used to execute one command on the output from another command (command1 | xargs command2), and most often the output-generating command is find (xargs is [...]