Gregg's MOTD

Kubernetes Cheatsheet

The get parameter is a powerful way of discovering your kubenetes resources. You can use it to query: * namespace * pod * node * deployment * service * replicasets

$ kubectl get nodes
$ kubectl get ns # ns is an abreviation for namespace
$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system

The create command can do just that for:

• service
• cronjob
• deployment
• job
• namespace (or ns)

$ kubectl create ns hello-world
$ kubectl create cronjob my-cronjob --image=alpine --schedule="*/15 * * * *" -- echo "hi there"

You can also use cj as an abreviation for cronjob

$ kubectl create cj my-cronjob --image=alpine --schedule="*/15 * * * *" -- echo "hi there"

The edit parameter allows you to update resources:

$ kubectr edit my-cronjob

The delete parameter allows you to remove resources:

$ kubectl delete cronjob my-cronjob

The apply parameter allows you to apply configurations from files

$ kubectl apply -f jenkins.yaml

The describe parameter provides details of your resources which could be:

• nodes
• pods
• services
• deployments
• replicasets
• cronjobs

$ kubectl describe cronjob my-cronjob

The logs parameter displays the contents of the resource’s log:

$ kubectl logs my-resource -n charts

The exec parameter allows you to exec into a container:

$ kubectl exec -it my-resource -n charts -- /bin/bash

The cp parameter lets you copy files and directories to and from containers:

$ kubectl cp file1.txt my-resource:file1.txt

Tags: cli, kubernetes, cheatsheet, motd

Extract a Single File from a Tarball

Suppose I have a tarball (.tar.gz file) which is large and I only want to extract a specific file from it. If I know the name of the file all I have to do is pass the file’s relative path that it is stored under to the command line.

Here is an example of the error you will get if you pass the incorrect file specification:

$ tar zxvf dirtree-tarball.tar.gz file-7-30003.txt
tar: file-7-30003.txt: Not found in archive

Since I don’t have the full path, I can just search for it:

$ tar tf dirtree-tarball.tar.gz | grep 'file-7-30003.txt'
./dir_2/file-7-30003.txt

Now I can pass the full path and extract the file:

$ tar zxvf dirtree-tarball.tar.gz ./dir_2/file-7-30003.txt
./dir_2/file-7-30003.txt
$ ls
dir_2  dirtree-tarball.tar.gz
$ tree
.
├── dir_2
│   └── file-7-30003.txt
└── dirtree-tarball.tar.gz

1 directory, 2 files

Note that it extracts it to the same directory tree but it will only extract the file(s) specified on the command line.

Tags: cli, tar, motd

Updating My Home Lab using Ansible

I have a variety of Raspberry Pis that I use for various tasks like my Tiny-Tiny RSS server, Gitea server, and Calibre server among other things. In order to keep them updated I use Ansible.

My update script is fairly simple:

$ cat update-pis.sh 
#!/bin/bash
ansible-playbook ./playbooks/apt.yml --user memyselfandi \
     --ask-pass --ask-become-pass -i ./inventory/hosts $@

The YAML playbook is likewise very simple:

$ cat ./playbooks/apt.yml 
- hosts: "*"
  become: yes
  tasks:
  - name: Update System Package Cache (apt)
    apt:
      update_cache: yes
      upgrade: 'yes'
 
  - name: Upgrade System Packages (apt)
    apt: upgrade=full

  - name: Remove unused dependencies
    apt: autoremove=true

  - name: Check if reboot is required
    shell: "[ -f /var/run/reboot-required ]"
    failed_when: False
    register: reboot_required
    changed_when: reboot_required.rc == 0
    notify: reboot

  handlers:
  - name: reboot
    command: /sbin/reboot

Although I can run this in a cronjob, I tend to run it manually (for now). I’m thinking about doing some major revisions to my Pi configuration anyway. Stay tuned for more on that subject.

Tags: cli, ansible, motd

List All MACs on the Local Network

Per the manpage:

The arp tool manipulates or displays the kernel’s IPv4 network neighbor cache. It can add entries to the table, delete one or display the current content. ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol, which is used to find the media access control address of a network neighbor for a given IPv4 Address.

You can use the arp command to list all of the devices on the local network. It is often useful to find the identities of hidden devices on your network. For example, if you just plugged a Raspberry Pi into your local network and need to find its IP address in order to connect to it via SSH.

# arp -i eth0 -a
? (192.168.1.90) at 42:b9:72:xx:xx:x0 [ether] on eth0
? (192.168.1.70) at 54:04:a6:xx:xx:xd [ether] on eth0
Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home (192.168.1.1) at 20:c0:47:xx:xx:x1 [ether] on eth0
? (192.168.1.99) at 34:64:a9:xx:xx:xd [ether] on eth0
? (192.168.1.60) at dc:a6:32:xx:xx:x3 [ether] on eth0

(I’ve masked some of the fields above)

Tags: cli, arp, networking, motd

KVM: Configure libvirt Network

You can update the network configuration for your KVM installation using the command line using the virsh command.

To list all of the available network enter the following command. The --all will is used to include the inactive networks:

# virsh net-list --all
Name State Autostart
-----------------------------------------
default active yes
NattedNetwork active yes

Then, edit the network you wish to update:

# EDITOR="vi" virsh net-edit NattedNetwork

Add host configuration(s) or whatever changes you wish to make to XML file:

<network>
<name>NattedNetwork</name>
<uuid>8483028d-667b-47e7-9a8e-f269783a8246</uuid>
<forward mode='nat'/>
<bridge name='virbr0' stp='on' delay='0'/>
<mac address='52:54:00:ad:b9:ed'/>
<ip address='192.168.122.1' netmask='255.255.255.0'>
<dhcp>
<range start='192.168.122.2' end='192.168.122.254'/>
</dhcp>
</ip>
</network>

Once you’re done, restart the network for the changes to take effect:

# virsh net-destroy NattedNetwork
# virsh net-start NattedNetwork

Tags: cli, libvirt, kvm, network, motd

Install sbopkg on Slackware

Sbopkg is a command‐line and dialog‐based tool to interact with the SlackBuilds.org repository, a collection of third‐party SlackBuild scripts to build Slackware packages.

Here are the steps for installing the latest version of sbopkg with Slackware.

1. Download the latest Slackware package from https://www.sbopkg.org/downloads.php using whatever method you find most convenient. At the time of this writing the latest version is https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.2/sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz. I will use that version in the commands below. If the version has changed, you would use the new filename in the commands. You can also use wget <packagename> to download it directly.

2. Open your favorite terminal and su to root.

3. Change to the directory where you downloaded the package.

4. Run the command installpkg sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz

If all goes well, sbopkg will now be installed.

To run sbopkg, open your favorite terminal, su - to root, and type sbopkg.

As usual, see the man or info page for more information.

Tags: cli, slackware, sbopkg, motd

Copying a Directory Tree Recursively Using tar

You can use tar to copy a directory tree to another directory in one shot along with preserving ownership, permissions and timestamps. This also avoids making an intermediary tarfile which may cause problems if the size of the file copy is large and the storage resources are low. Just cd to the top of the directory that you want to copy and begin.

Let’s assume that you want to copy the contents of the source directory to a target directory:

$ cd /path/to/source
$ tar cf - * | (cd /target; tar xfp - )

Tags: cli, tar, copying, motd

Removing Blank Spaces from a Group of File Names

This set of commands iterate over each file in the current directory and will replace any blank spaces in a filename with an underscore (_).

First, we’ll create a set of sample files:

$ for i in {0..9}; do touch "file-${i} (number-${i}).txt"; done
$ ls
file-0\ (number-0).txt file-4\ (number-4).txt file-8\ (number-8).txt
file-1\ (number-1).txt file-5\ (number-5).txt file-9\ (number-9).txt
file-2\ (number-2).txt file-6\ (number-6).txt
file-3\ (number-3).txt file-7\ (number-7).txt

Now, we’ll execute the set of commands:

$ for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

And now you can see that the blanks have been replaced.

$ ls
file-0_(number-0).txt file-4_(number-4).txt file-8_(number-8).txt
file-1_(number-1).txt file-5_(number-5).txt file-9_(number-9).txt
file-2_(number-2).txt file-6_(number-6).txt
file-3_(number-3).txt file-7_(number-7).txt

Tags: cli, bash, rename, motd

Remove Parentheses from File Names

This script will rename Windows backup files by removing the ’ (date)’ from the filename. It will remove the parentheses and everything between them from the file name, so that a file with the name file-1 (2023-09-10).txt will be renamed to file-1.txt. Note that since the data between the parentheses will be removed, the resulting file name must be unique for this script to prevent data from being overwritten. Other than that it should work for any fileset that meets the beforementioned constraints.

First, let’s create some sample files:

$ for i in {0..9}; do touch "file-${i} (number-${i}).txt"; done
$ ls
file-0\ (number-0).txt file-4\ (number-4).txt file-8\ (number-8).txt
file-1\ (number-1).txt file-5\ (number-5).txt file-9\ (number-9).txt
file-2\ (number-2).txt file-6\ (number-6).txt
file-3\ (number-3).txt file-7\ (number-7).txt

Now, we’ll execute the script on the sample files:

$ for f in *; do n=$(echo $f | sed "s/[ (][^)]*[)]//g");mv "${f}" "${n}"; done

If we look at the directory listing now we see that the file names are updated:

$ ls
file-0.txt file-2.txt file-4.txt file-6.txt file-8.txt
file-1.txt file-3.txt file-5.txt file-7.txt file-9.txt

Tags: cli, bash, rename, motd

Swapping the CMD and Control Keys on a Macbook Running Linux

I find it annoying not having a CTRL key available for both hands so I tend to swap the Command and CTRL key settings on my 2012 “Slackbook”.

1. Launch a terminal
2. Edit the X11 Keyboard Extension

# vim /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc

3. Make the following changes. Ensure your file looks like this:

key <LCTL> { [ Super_L ] };
key <LWIN> { [ Control_L ] };
...
key <RCTL> { [ Super_R ] };
key <RWIN> { [ Control_R ] };

4. Clear xkb’s cache

# rm -rf /var/lib/xkb/*

5. If the keys are not swapped after Step 4, restart your session or your computer.

Tags: cli, slackware, xkb, motd

IP Address Blocks

There are 4 classes of IPv4 networks:

A Class A network can have 16,777,214 computers on it. It has an IP address that starts with a number in the range 0 to 126. 127 is reserved for the local loopback. (Only 127.0.0.1 is ever used although this may change in the future).

A Class B network can have 65,534 computers on it. It has an IP address that starts in the range of 128 to 191.

A Class C network can have 254 computers on it. This network is often used for many home networks and most company networks. It has an IP address that starts with a number from 192 to 223.

Class D (224–239) is used for multicast and Class E (240–254) is reserved.

Within the above classes are sets of private network addresses:

• Any address that starts with 10
• Any address that starts 172 and where the second number is 16–31.
• Any address that starts with 192.168

Routers will generally discard any traffic to private network addresses. So,in order to talk to other devices, your router does something called Network Address Translation or NATtin. You can read more about Network Address Translation and how it works here.

Tags: cli, networks, ip-address, motd

Vim: More Copying Tips

Blocks of lines can be copied in Vim using ranges, i.e., two numbers separated by a comma indicating the start and end of the block of lines.

Some Examples

To copy line 20-25, use:

:20,25yank

To copy five lines just above the cursor:

:-4,.yank

where the period (.) indicates the current line.

To copy five lines just below the cursor:

:.,+4yank

Tags: cli, vim, copy, ranges, motd

Log File Maintenance and Cleanup

Log files sometimes take up a lot of disk space. Some applications have internal processes that run periodically to manage them and some do not. Often, this becomes a problems after a while as the logs consume all of your partition space.

You can manage these files yourself with a simple script running in a cronjob (or systemd timers if you’re so inclined) if they have a common naming convention and you have the proper access.

Let’s say you have an application called myapp that keeps it’s logs in a directory called /opt/myapp/logs and those files all end with a .log file extension.

cat >logmanage.sh <<"EOF"
#!/bin/sh
LOGDIR="/opt/myapp/logs"
# Compress all of the files older than a day
find ${LOGDIR} -name '*.log' -mtime +0 -exec compress {} \;
# Purge all of the logs older than a week
find ${LOGDIR} -name '*.Z' -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;
EOF

These two commands will compress those files that are more than older than a day and remove the compressed files after a week.

Add a crontab entry to run this everyday and you’re all set.

Tags: cli, sysadmin, logs, find, motd

Vim: How to Copy & Paste

Most Vim tutorials and cheatsheets out there will cover how to copy and paste. Pasting is the easy part. Let’s talk about copying!

Copying

To copy the current line (line in which the cursor is placed), simply press double lower y (yy) or single upper case y (Y).

yy or Y: copies/yanks the current line, including the newline character at the end of the line.

To copy a specific number of lines under the cursor (beginning from the current location of the cursor) simply precede the command with the number of lines that you wish to copy, i.e., Nyy (where N is the number of lines).

You can also use the following operation to copy two lines:

:.,+yank

where the dot (.) refers to the current line and plus sign (+) means plus one line below the cursor.

So, in order to use this syntax to copy 3 lines, use 3yy or :.,+2yank will work.

You can also copy a specific number of lines above the cursor From the current cursor location use yN-1k, where N-1 is the number of lines you want to copy. So, to copy two lines from the current position of the cursor, press (in normal mode, or escape mode), y2-1k, or y1k.

To copy 5 lines above the current cursor position:

y4k

You can also use other operations. for example, to copy only the fifth line just above the cursor:

Copying & Pasting

:-4yank

You can can copy lines and paste them right above the cursor in one shot using the operation :Nt-, where N is the line number you want to copy.

You can can copy specific line number and paste right below the cursor directly using the operation :Nt., where N is the line number you want to copy.

For example, to copy line two and paste just above the current cursor position;

:2t-

To copy line two and paste just below the current cursor position;

:2t.

The above commands also work with a range of lines rather than a single line, such as :4,7t. will yank lines 4-7 and paste them below the cursor.

Pasting

p or P: pastes one or more lines, basically whatever is in the buffer, under or above the cursor respectively.

Tags: cli, vim, motd

Format Disk using exFat on Command Line

You may not always be working on a Linux system using a GUI, like a server or a system with very low resources. Sometimes you may need to format a disk to exFat using the Command Line. It’s not really that difficult.

The first thing you need to do is to know which device is to be formatted so before you connect the disk or USB make sure you run the lsblk command before and after doing so. This way you will be certain not to format the wrong disk by mistake and cause a data loss.

Run lsblk before inserting the disk:

# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   630M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0 216.3G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0  15.9G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0   1.4T  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0   630M  0 part 
├─sdb2   8:18   0 244.1G  0 part /mnt/lfs
├─sdb3   8:19   0   1.1T  0 part /home
└─sdb4   8:20   0  15.6G  0 part 
sdc      8:32   1     0B  0 disk 
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  

Then insert the disk and run lsblk again:

# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   630M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0 216.3G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0  15.9G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0   1.4T  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0   630M  0 part 
├─sdb2   8:18   0 244.1G  0 part /mnt/lfs
├─sdb3   8:19   0   1.1T  0 part /home
└─sdb4   8:20   0  15.6G  0 part 
sdc      8:32   1     0B  0 disk 
sdd      8:48   1 979.8M  0 disk  <--+
├─sdd1   8:49   1    50M  0 part  <--|--New device
└─sdd2   8:50   1 928.8M  0 part  <--+
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  

Compare the output and you’ll see that in this case, the device inserted was /dev/sdd.

Armed with that information, we can now begin our task. Start by invoking parted with the -a optimal option to specify the optimal alignment type:

root@slacker:~# parted -a optimal /dev/sdd
GNU Parted 3.4
Using /dev/sdd
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.

Next, set the partition table to gpt:

(parted) mktable gpt                                                      
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdd will be destroyed and all data on
this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? Yes

Now, create a new partition table of exFAT type:

(parted) mkpart exFAT 0% -1                                               

Set the flag for the first partition to msftdata:

(parted) set 1 msftdata on
(parted) align-check opt 1
1 aligned
(parted) quit                                                             
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

Now you should be done. Let’s print out the partition to make sure everything is OK:

# parted /dev/sdd print
Model: SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 1027MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name   Flags
 1      1049kB  1027MB  1026MB  fat32        exFAT  msftdata

Now we can format it:

# mkfs.exfat -n exFAT /dev/sdd1
exfatprogs version : 1.1.3
Creating exFAT filesystem(/dev/sdd1, cluster size=32768)

Writing volume boot record: done
Writing backup volume boot record: done
Fat table creation: done
Allocation bitmap creation: done
Upcase table creation: done
Writing root directory entry: done
Synchronizing...

exFAT format complete!
# 

Tags: cli, exfat, parted, motd

Find Your External IP Address

It’s easy to find your internal IP address my using tools like ifconfig or ip a but to find your external IP address (the one that connects you to the outside world) you must use other means. Here are 3 simple commands that you can use to do just that:

$ curl ifcfg.me
72.76.yyy.xxx

$ curl icanhazip.com
72.76.yyy.xxx

$ nslookup myip.opendns.com. resolver1.opendns.com
Server: resolver1.opendns.com
Address: 208.67.222.222#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: myip.opendns.com
Address: 72.76.yyy.xxx

Tags: cli, network, curl, nslookup, motd

Vim: Underlining a Line

Of course, Vim is just a text editor but you can underline a line using a set of keystrokes that copies the string to be underlined to the next line and then replaces the string with hyphens using this set of Vim commands: YpVr-

So if you have a line:

This Is My Page Title

just position the cursor at the start of that line and enter the abovementioned commands and it will turn it into:

This Is My Page Title
---------------------

This would save you a few keystrokes if you use Vim for creating a lot of text documentation and use hyphens a lot in your section headers.

Tags: cli, vim, motd

Finding Duplicate Files in a Directory Tree

Sometimes I need to find all of the duplicate files in a directory tree. I have this issue all of the time when I move my music collection. Here is a nifty script to sort these things out:

#!/bin/bash
find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 -D --all-repeated=separate

If you pipe the output of the above into a text file, for example, duplicates.txt, you can then create a script from that:

awk '{$1="";printf("rm \"%s\"\n",$0);}' ~/duplicates.txt >~/duplicates.sh

Then edit the file and remove the lines for the files you want to keep, make the script executable and run it. Done.

Tags: cli, duplicates, find, awk, motd

Virt-Manager Pool Running Out of Space

Once upon a time, I had an issue with virt-manager’s pool space running low. I was creating too many VMs using the default configuration. This needed to be resolved because images are being created in /var/lib/libvirt/images which was part of my root partition, which was also low. Since I am the only user on this machine, I decided to change this to default to my home directory:

1. Create ~/libvirt/images
2. Run $ sudo virsh pool-edit default as a privileged user or as the root user.
3. Change the path to point to your new directory.

Tags: cli, virt-manager, virsh, motd

KVM: Importing an OVA appliance

You may or may not be aware if it, but an OVA file is just a tar archive containing an .ovf and a .vmdk files, respectively the VM configuration and disk.

$ ls *.ova
HTAOE.ova
$ tar tf HTAOE.ova
HTAOE.ovf
HTAOE-disk001.vmdk
HTAOE.mf

So, you can simply extract the files:

$ tar xvf HTAOE.ova

And convert to a format appropriate for QEMU/KVM:

List the available formats

$ qemu-img -h | tail -n4
Supported formats: blkdebug blklogwrites blkverify bochs cloop compress copy-before-write copy-on-read dmg file ftp ftps host_cdrom host_device http https luks nbd null-aio null-co nvme parallels preallocate qcow qcow2 qed quorum raw replication ssh throttle vdi vhdx vmdk vpc vvfat

See <https://qemu.org/contribute/report-a-bug> for how to report bugs.
More information on the QEMU project at <https://qemu.org>.

Do the actual conversion (I chose qcow2 here)

$ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 HTAOE.vmdk HTAOE.qcow2

Have a look at the .ovf too, for information on expected machine configuration, resources (eg. memory and cpu), etc.

After the conversion, simply create a new VM and make it use the newly created disk as the primary disk.

Tags: cli, kvm, ova, virtualization, qemu, motd

Compiling 32-bit C/C++ Programs on 64-bit

By default, gcc will compile your c/c++ program to 64-bit instructions. In order to compile to 32-bit you need to add a -m32 flag to the command line. For example, to compile a file called hello-world.c using a Linux terminal, you would do something like this:

$ gcc -m32 hello-world.c -o hello-world

If you get the following error:

fatal error: bits/predefs.h: No such file or directory

it means that the multilib standard library is missing. Therefore, you must install gcc-multlib. The name is different based upon the distribution and the compiler. For Debian/Ubuntu-based distros it would be:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib # For C
$ sudo apt-get install g++-multilib # For C++

Tags: cli, programming, c, cpp, multilib, motd

How to Clean Up the Fedora Root Folder

OK, so you’re running Fedora and you’re getting warnings that you’re running out of disk space on the root folder. What are your options?

The first thing to consider is resizing the root partition size. For that you can find instructions here

If that is not an option, then the next thing you probably should do is find out which folders/directories are causing the issue. You can use the du command and some piping to figure this out:

Search the largest folders

$ sudo du --exclude="/home" -x -h -a / | sort -r -h | head -30

Common cleanable folders

Sometimes the issue is found in the docker cache:

$ docker system prune -a

or previous kernel versions:

$ sudo dnf remove $(dnf repoquery --installonly --latest-limit=-2 -q)

Journal logs

$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

Caches

The dnf package cache can be cleaned up too:

$ sudo dnf clean packages

You can also try cleaning up the Fedora version cache:

$ sudo dnf system-upgrade clean

Tags: cli, fedora, disk-space, clean, resize, sysadmin, motd

Install Spotify using Flatpak using Command Line

If Flatpak is not installed, then install it:

$ sudo dnf install -y flatpak # Fedora
$ sudo apt install flatpak # Ubuntu-based
$ sudo zypper install flatpak # SUSE
$ sudo pacman -S flatpak # Arch-based

Since flathub.org is the most popular flatpak repository we will use the command line to enable it:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub \
https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Go to the Spotify page on Flathub and choose “Install”, or run the installation from the command line:

$ sudo flatpak install flathub com.spotify.Client

Tags: cli, flatpak, spotify, motd

How to reveal dot files in finder?

Here’s one from my archives. To reveal dot files in macOS Finder, open your Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) application and then enter,

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Then restart Finder by holding down Option and Control, or right-clicking on the Finder’s icon in your Dock and choosing “Relaunch”.

To revert this behavior, simply change the YES to NO in that defaults command.

Tags: cli, finder, macos, motd

Install Epson ET-3850 Printer Driver on Slackware 15.0

I recently bought an Epson ET-3850 printer from Costco to replace my HP OfficeJet which was about 10 years old and the family was starting to have issues with establishing a wi-fi connection to it on their Windoze laptops. It took quite a while to setup. The Epson seems to be doing the job. Time will tell, however I discovered that setting it up for Slackware would also take a bit of effort. Drivers are only available on the Epson website in RPM or DEB format so I had to create a Slackware package to install it. Here’s how I went about doing that.

1. First, download the RPM package from the Epson Support website.
2. Convert the RPM to a Slackware .txz package using the rpm2txz utility with the following options:

• -c: to make sure the file permissions are set correctly
• -S: to extract the install scripts from the RPM (be careful with this)
• -n: name the package using standard Slackware format
• -d: make a slack-desc from the RPM’s metadata

# rpm2txz -c -S -n -d epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.4-1.x86_64.rpm

3. Now review the script. Make any changes, if necessary (I didn’t need to), and update the converted package:

# mkdir temp && cd temp
# explodepkg ../epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.4-x86_64-1.txz
# makepkg -l y -c y ../epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.4-x86_64-1.txz

4. Once that is done you can install it:

# cd ..
# installpkg epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.4-x86_64-1.txz

The printer did not show up as available to install in the “System Settings” app so go to the local CUPS webpage at http://localhost:631 and do the setup from there. Print a few test pages. It seems to be working fine on my Slackware laptop. You can move the package to your other Slackware machines and install there too.

Tags: cli, slackware, printers, epson, motd

Vim Keyboard Shortcuts

1. gg Move to the first line of the file
2. G Move to the last line
3. gg=G Reindent the whole file
4. gv Reselect the last visual selection
5. < Jump to beginning of last visual selection
6. > Jump to end of last visual selection
7. ^ Move to first non-blank character of the line
8. g_ Move the last non-blank character of the line (but you remove trailing whitespace, right)
9. g_lD Delete all the trailing whitespace on the line
10. ea Append to the end of the current word
11. gf Jump to the file name under the cursor
12. xp Swap character forward
13. Xp Swap character backward
14. yyp Duplicate the current line
15. yapP Duplicate the current paragraph
16. dat Delete around an HTML tag, including the tag
17. dit Delete inside an HTML tag, excluding the tag
18. w Move one word to the right
19. b Move one word to the left
20. dd Delete the current line
21. zc Close current fold
22. zo Open current fold
23. za Toggle current fold
24. zi Toggle folding entirely
25. << Outdent current line
26. >> Indent current line
27. z= Show spelling corrections
28. zg Add to spelling dictionary
29. zw Remove from spelling dictionary
30. ~ Toggle case of current character
31. gUw Uppercase until end of word (u for lower, ~ to toggle)
32. gUiw Uppercase entire word (u for lower, ~ to toggle)
33. gUU Uppercase entire line
34. gu$ Lowercase until the end of the line
35. da" Delete the next double-quoted string
36. + Move to the first non-whitespace character of the next line
37. S Delete current line and go into insert mode
38. I insert at the beginning of the line
39. ci" Change what’s inside the next double-quoted string
40. ca{ Change inside the curly braces (try [, (, etc.)
41. vaw Visually select word
42. dap Delete the whole paragraph
43. r Replace a character
44. [ Jump to beginning of last yanked text
45. ] Jump to end of last yanked text
46. g; Jump to the last change you made
47. g, Jump back forward through the change list
48. & Repeat last substitution on current line
49. g& Repeat last substitution on all lines
50. ZZ Save the current file and quit Vim

Tags: cli, vim, cheatsheet, shortcuts, motd

Linkers

If you’re a developer who is interested in “how the sausage is made” then you might want to check out Ian Lance Taylor’s blog which contains a series of articles discussed on Klaatu’s GNU World Order Episode 400 about the linker

Here are the links to the articles:

Linkers part 1 Linkers part 2 Linkers part 3 Linkers part 4 Linkers part 5 Linkers part 6

Tags: cli, linkers, programming, compiling, motd

Mounting a Remote Drive using FUSE

If you have FUSE (Filessystem in Userspace) installed, you can use SSH to mount a remote drive locally. This is very simple to do and you don’t need to be root. You just need SSH access to the remote system. Just create a directory to mount the system and use the sshfs command to connect the remote to it.

Here I will mount my home directory on my remote server named slacker locally to a directory on my laptop’s home directory:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir slacker
$ sshfs user@192.168.1.99:/home/user/ slacker
$ cd slacker/
$ ls
Backups       KVM       Public       bin       iso           public_html
Calibre\ Library  Music     PycharmProjects  cv_debug.log  logs          tmp
Desktop       OneDrive  README.txt       file.txt      lynis-report.dat
Documents     Pictures  Templates        fortune.txt   lynis.log
Downloads     Podcasts  Videos       go        pCloudDrive

The above is a listing of my home directory on the remote.

Tags: cli, fuse, sshfs, motd

Install Joplin on Slackware 15.0

On a recent episode of Hacker Public Radio, the host, Lee listed several note-taking apps that he had tried to use. One of them was Joplin which I have been using for several years now. I feel that it is probably one of the best note-taking apps available that:

• Supports Markdown
• Is cross-platform
• Supports vim keyboard mappings (I can’t live without this)
• Integrates with multiple cloud storage environments.

I use it on a daily basis for almost all of my notes but it also supports checklists on my iPhone, iPad, Windoze laptop, and all of my Slackware devices (desktop and laptops). Give it a try!

As of yet, it is not available as a SlackBuild, but you can install it on Slackware quite easily using the CLI with:

$ wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash

Have fun!

Tags: cli, joplin, slackware, note-apps, motd

SlackBuilds: Where Are They Located?

You should find a file in /var/log/packages for each SlackBuild that you have installed. You can distinguish the SlackBuilds package from standard Slackware packages by the substring SBo embedded in the filename. So you can create a list of all of the SlackBuilds installed on your machine by just doing an ls *SBo* in that directory.

ls /var/log/packages | grep SBo

or

ls /var/log/packages/*SBo

If you plan on reinstalling it may be a good idea to pipe that information out to a text file.

ls /var/log/packages | grep SBo > SBo_packages.txt

If you cat one of those files you will display a text file that lists certain information about the package, the location of the package and a brief description. For example, the file for sigil package starts like this:

PACKAGE NAME: sigil-0.9.12-x86_64-1_SBo
COMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE: 7.7M
UNCOMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE: 25M
PACKAGE LOCATION: /tmp/sigil-0.9.12-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
sigil: sigil (Multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor)
sigil:
sigil: Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to
sigil: edit books in ePub format.
sigil:
sigil: Homepage: https://sigil-ebook.com/
sigil:

It then goes on and displays a file list of all of the files contained by the package and where they were installed.

Armed with the above information, you can the cd to the /tmp directory and find the package itself:

$ cd /tmp
$ ls -l sigil-0.9.12-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8070041 May 29 16:24 sigil-0.9.12-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
$

Tags: cli, slackware, slackbuilds, motd

Slackware Kernel Upgrade (elilo)

If you are using elilo with Slackware, after running the slackpkg --upgrade-all script and you see that a new kernel was installed, you need to run the following commands to move the latest kernel to its proper location in order to boot:

geninitrd
cp /boot/vmlinuz-generic /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/vmlinuz
cp /boot/initrd.gz /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/initrd.gz

Tags: cli, slackware, motd

How to Change the UID or GID for a User or Group

Let’s assume we have a user, Jane Doe, with the username of jdoe and the UID of 1001 who we need to move to another UID (for some reason or another).

First, change the UID of the user:

# usermod -u 3001 jdoe

Next, use search and change all file’s ownership owned by this user:

# find / -user 1001 -exec chown -h jdoe {} \;

What if we need to change the GID of a group? Basically the same process can be used. Let’s say we want to change the admins group’s GID from 2001 to 4001.

First, change the GID:

# groupmod -g 4001 admins

Now, use search and change all file’s ownership owned by this group:

# find / -group 2001 -exec chgrp -h admins {} \;

Tags: cli, sysadmin, uid, gid, motd

Netstat

My most frequently used netstat command with parameters for checking port (active internet) connections is:

$ netstat -tulpn

You can also pipe the output to grep to filter for specific ports or addresses.

Here is a brief listing of some of the many options:

$ netstat [options]

Option	Action
-a	Display the state of all sockets, not just the active.
-c	Continuously display information, updating every second.
-i	Include network device statistics.
-n	Display all network addresses as numbers.
-o	Display additional information.
-r	Display routing tables.
-t	Display only the TCP sockets.
-u	Display only the UDP sockets.
-v	Print the netstat version number and exit.
-w	List only the raw sockets.
-x	Display only the Unix sockets.

Tags: cli, networking, netstat, motd

Extracting Client Certificates

You can display all of the server’s certificates using the following command:

$ openssl s_client -showcerts server.name:port | sed -n '/-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----/,/-----END CERTIFICATE-----/p'

This output can be piped or copy/pasted to a text file (only keep the parts between the BEGIN and END CERTIFICATE sections) and give it a .crt file extension. You can then use it as input to whatever client app needs it.

In the below example we pipe the openssl output to grep to remove the identifiers of the certificates. You may not get your prompt back until the command times out, so you should wait a bit and after a bit you should get something similar to the following output:

$ openssl s_client -showcerts example.com:443 2>&1 |grep -v '^depth'| sed -n '/-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----/,/-----END CERTIFICATE-----/p'
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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==
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Tags: cli, certificates, openssl, motd

Use the zdump Command to Check Daylight Savings Time Settings

If you are one of us lucky folks who live in timezones that observe Daylight Savings Time, you can use the zdump timezone dumper command to view your server’s settings for same. This command prints the current time in each timezone provided on the command line.

You can use grep to reduce the output to just the lines that reference the current year:

$ zdump -v EST5EDT |grep '2023'
EST5EDT Sun Mar 12 06:59:59 2023 UT = Sun Mar 12 01:59:59 2023 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
EST5EDT Sun Mar 12 07:00:00 2023 UT = Sun Mar 12 03:00:00 2023 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 5 05:59:59 2023 UT = Sun Nov 5 01:59:59 2023 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 5 06:00:00 2023 UT = Sun Nov 5 01:00:00 2023 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

You can also run the same command by location:

$ zdump -v /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York|grep '2023'
/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York Sun Mar 12 06:59:59 2023 UT = Sun Mar 12 01:59:59 2023 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York Sun Mar 12 07:00:00 2023 UT = Sun Mar 12 03:00:00 2023 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York Sun Nov 5 05:59:59 2023 UT = Sun Nov 5 01:59:59 2023 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York Sun Nov 5 06:00:00 2023 UT = Sun Nov 5 01:00:00 2023 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

Tags: cli, zdump, timezones, motd

Logging to the System Logger in Bash

If you are writing a shell script and want any messages to appear in the system logger you can just use the logger command to do this.

Here is an example on my Slackware system:

$ logger -t TEST "This is a test message"
$ cat /var/log/messages
cat: /var/log/messages: Permission denied
$ su -
Password:
# cat /var/log/messages
Aug 23 17:44:47 slackbook TEST: This is a test message

You can also log to systemd by providing a parameter to logger:

logger --journald <<end
MESSAGE_ID=67feb6ffbaf24c5cbec13c008dd72309
MESSAGE=The dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.
DOGS=bark
CARAVAN=goes on
end

or you can optionally provide a file whose contents will be logged:

logger --journald=entry.txt

See the logger manpage for additional information.

Tags: cli, logging, systemd, logger, motd

Encrypting Files using OpenSSL

Let’s say we have a file that contains sensitive information and we want to encyrpt it. You can encrypt a file very easily using the openssl command:

$ cat secret.txt
This file contains some very secret stuff
$ openssl enc -e -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2 -a -salt -in secret.txt -out secret.enc
enter aes-256-cbc encryption password: <enter-a-password>
Verifying - enter aes-256-cbc encryption password: <enter-a-password>
$ cat secret.enc
U2FsdGVkX19Rnz48WjLeljd19wvNOhQy+zzYwxCANezCTkqpGMl9zs4HdwdUzZjl
VQkUsCJ7b0rUpRi83UlcwA==

Now we decrypt it (output to a different file). Make sure you enter the same password that you input above:

$ openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2 -a -salt -in secret.enc -out unencrypted-secret.txt
enter aes-256-cbc decryption password: <enter-a-password>
$ cat unencrypted-secret.txt
This file contains some very secret stuff
$

Tags: cli, openssl, encryption, motd

Finding the SSL Directory on a Server

I’ve had situations where I was configuring a secure connection to an application and needed to know where the SSL certificates are stored on the server. You can easily find out this information using the openssl and grep commands:

$ openssl version -a | grep OPENSSLDIR
OPENSSLDIR: "/etc/pki/tls"

Tags: cli, ssl, openssl, motd

Processing The Results of The Find Command

As mentioned in the previous post, the find command searches for files, but it has another very useful feature in that it can also perform an action on the files it finds.

I am a vim user, and let’s assume that I want to find my editor’s backup files in the current directory trees. These filesall end with a tilda (~) character. We would use this command to search for them:

$ find . -name '*~'
./.buffer.un~
./.find_buffer.txt.un~
./.Tips.txt.un~

which results in a list of 3 files. All it takes to remove these files is to add on a little to the end of the last command:

$ find . -name '*~' -exec rm -i '{}' \;

Now, not only will this command find all the matching files in the current directory tree, but it will also delete them.

The -exec parameter tells find to execute the command that follows it on each result. The string {} is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command. The {} string is enclosed in single quotes to protect them from interpretation as shell script punctuation. The \; sequence indicates the end of the -exec argument.

See the manpage for more information.

Tags: cli, find, motd

Using the Find Command to Search for Files

One of the most useful and flexible GNU utilities is the find command. Understanding how to use this command is very important to make you Linux life more efficient.

The general syntax of the find command is:

find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [starting-point...] [expression]

That looks like a lot, but most of the time you may only need 2 things:

find [path] [expression]

where the path is a starting point or the top of a directory tree to be searched, and expression is a property and value pair of what you’re trying to find. This may be a file name, last access time, last modification time, size, and/or ownership.

For example, if you’re looking for the file stdlib.h, use the following command:

find / -name stdlib.h

If you run this as a normal user, using find from the root directory will often result in a lot of error messages being output to the terminal because the normal user doesn’t have access to view some of the directories in the search. Therefore you may want to pipe the stderr output to /dev/null to avoid seeing those messages. You can do that like this:

find / -name stdlib.h 2>/dev/null

Tags: cli, find, motd

Git Aliases

Once you start developing some experience with using git on the command line, you will sometimes find yourself typing some long commands over and over again. You can create aliases in git that are very similar to the bash alias shortcuts you use in the shell.

Steps to do this are highlighted in chapter 2.7 of the Git Book authored by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress.

One of the commands that I use a lot is:

$ git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all --date=local

which provides a nice colorized listing of the project’s activity and looks something like this:

* 2f6cc07 (HEAD -> automation, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) Updated merge for README.md
|\
| * 84e20c2 Initial commit
* 8dc456f Completed migration for github site.
* bf67601 fixed head before sed
* 89780c3 Merge pull request #124 from thalios1973/feat/pandoc-test-fix
|\
| * c9a297c Added additional check that will allow the use of pandoc without the --strict flag or 'hsmarkdown' hack.
* | 025cf79 Merge pull request #125 from thalios1973/feat/body-end-file
|\ \
| |/
|/|
| * 272b1b6 Added ability to include custom code just before the </body> tag. body_end_file global config variable added.
|/
* 9f66ad0 README formatting
* 500253e Support for static, not managed by bashblog html files. Close #92
* 3c73ef6 Deleted the now defunct Twitter JSON API for share count. Fix #117
* b5a4590 bump version to 2.8
* 5c8e0e5 Revert changes in #116
* 5fc037f Merge branch 'master' of github.com:cfenollosa/bashblog
|\
| * c6a9bef Revert tag management from #116
| * 6222672 Better error message for $EDITOR. Close #112
| * 36d79b5 support Markdown.pl in bashblog folder. Close #113
| * 7154c07 Merge pull request #116 from McDutchie/master
| |\
| | * f50a17c tags_in_post(): bugfix for non-GNU 'sed'
| | * 2a29b22 Fix renaming using 'bb.sh edit -n'. Suppress 'which' errmsg.
| | * 62a26bb Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master' Resolve minor editing 2.6-to-2.7 editing conflict in bb.sh
| | |\
| | * | 54cc0c8 More code refactoring. Limit word splitting and disable globbing by default.
| | * | d1a84d6 Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master'
| | |\ \
| | * | | a674ec5 rebuild_tags(): use array for more robust file handling
| * | | | 2157b92 Slavic language support, thanks to Tomasz Jadowski
| | |_|/
| |/| |

but nicer than this website can depict (for now).

Rather than typing this long command every time, I just create an alias:

$ git config --global alias.lola 'log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all --date=local'

Then all I need to type from now on is:

$ git lola

Tags: cli, git, aliases, motd

Setting Up Git to Ignore ELF Binaries (C/C++ Output on Linux)

The starting point for this experiment was from here

An Example using C Program Source

Let’s say we have a pre-existing directory of some C source code files:

$ ls
Makefile print print.c print.h print.o

And we initialize a new git repository in that directory:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/user/tmp/printer/.git/

$ cat .gitignore
# Ignore all
*

# Unignore all with extensions
!*.*

# Unignore all dirs
!*/

# Unignore make files
!Makefile

# Ignore .o files
*.o

# Ignorebindir
bin/
# or
*/bin/*

Let’s see how we did:

$ git status
On branch master

No commits yet

Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
.gitignore
Makefile
print.c
print.h

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

So the print and the print.o files are not showing up, which was our initial goal.

You may have to tweak the settings in the above .gitignore file to your own situation, but as you can see it is possible to setup git to ignore the ELF binaries output by gcc. I would probably also add a.out to the list of unignored files just to cover those times when you’re not using a Makefile. YMMV.

Tags: cli, git, gcc, motd

Processing a List of Files from an Input File

Suppose we have a list of files stored in a text file and we want to perform an operation on each of them within a bash script. How would we go about doing that? Well, there are several options, here are a few.

$ cat input-files.txt
file-1.txt
file-2.txt
file-3.txt
file-4.txt
file-5.txt
file-6.txt
file-7.txt
file-8.txt
file-9.txt

Now, if we want to operate on each file in this list we can do something like this:

while IFS= read -r filename
do
echo "Do something on ${filename} here..."
done < "input-files.txt"

or alternatively,

input="input-files.txt"
while IFS= read -r filename
do
printf '%s\n' "${filename}"
done < "${input}"

Tags: cli, bash, shell-scripting, motd

String Processing with Bash

There are various tools built into bash that enable you to manipulate a variable or string which come in handy when writing shell scripts. Here are a few notable ones:

Find the length of a string

${#string}

Get a Substring from a String

${string:pos} or ${string:pos:len}

Removing Substrings from a String

${string#substr}
${string%substr}
${string##substr}
${string%%substr}

Some examples

Here’s a few examples of how you can process a variable that points to an absolute path of a file and shows how to extract certain parts of said file’s path:

var=/home/user/code/blogstuff/index.html.j2
echo ${var} # => /home/user/code/blogstuff/index.html.j2
echo ${var#*.} # => html.j2
echo ${var##*.} # => j2
echo ${var%/*.*} # => /home/user/code/blogstuff

Replace a Substring of a String

${string/pattern/substr} # => Replaces the 1st match found
${string//pattern/substr} # => Replaces all of the matches found

Replace the Beginning or End of a String

${string/#pattern/substr}
${string/%pattern/substr}
file=${var##/*/} # => index.html.j2
echo ${file/#index/fubar} # => fubar.html.j2
echo ${file/%j2/fubar} # => index.html.fubar

Tags: cli, bash, shell-scripting, motd

Convert a Git Repo to a Bare Repo

If you have a git repository that you haven’t cloned from a remote location, i.e., one that was created locally, it is easy to convert it to a bare repository. This process describes how to:

1. Take a “normal” git repository
2. Move the .git directory to another location
3. Convert it to a bare repository

Suppose you have a git repository called repo. To convert it to a bare repository, execute the following commands:

cd repo
mv .git ../repo.git # renaming just for clarity
cd ..
rm -fr repo
cd repo.git
git config --bool core.bare true

Now you can clone it like a “normal” repository:

$ cd ..
$ git clone repo.git myrepo
$ cd myrepo/
$ ls
file-1.txt file-2.txt file-3.txt file-4.txt file-5.txt
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean
$

Please note that repositories from a remote location do not have all of their git branch contents and history stored locally, so doing this to a repository cloned from a remote will result in a repository that will be missing data.

Tags: cli, git, motd

Git: Working with Git for the First Time

Here’s the first step every user should start with after downloading and installing git but BEFORE doing anything else: Set up your global environment variables! If you don’t do this git will abort your commit and give you an annoying message like this one:

$ git commit file.txt
Author identity unknown

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: empty ident name (for <user@localhost>) not allowed

You only should have to do the git config --global... commands one time. If you want to use a different user ID and email address in each repository then don’t include the --global parameter and it will only update your current repository leaving your global setting alone. If you’re contributing to different repositories using different email addresses or IDs then you definitely want to get into this habit.

Tags: cli, git, motd

Git: Committing to a Different Branch

Let’s imaging that you’ve made some changes to files in your work directory and then realized that you aren’t in the correct branch. Now you want to get the changes you’ve made to the right branch but no change the current branch. What do you do?

There is no git command to do this but you can use the git stash command to fix this.

This involves:

1. Using the git stash command to temporarily store our changes elsewhere,
2. Checkout the correct branch, and
3. “Unstash” the changes to the correct branch.

Let’s say that we’ve made some changes in our repository’s new-release branch but they should have been made in the new-feature branch.

git stash
git checkout new-feature
git stash pop

We can now perform a commit, and update this branch.

git commit -a -m "Updated functions in new-feature branch."

Tags: cli, git, motd

Printing from Virtualbox

If you want to set up your system so that you can access your Linux host’s printer from a Windows VirtualBox client then:

On Your Linux Host

1. Install your printer driver. Get your printer working on your host first.
2. Install CUPS if it is not already installed.
3. Add your printer to CUPS at http://localhost:631/admin.
4. Set your virtual machine’s Network to Bridged Adapter (eth0) in Settings and connect the cable as necessary (Advanced menu).
   
5. Startup VirtualBox.
   
6. In a terminal, enter ifconfig to list your current network settings and copy down your host’s (eth0) address or you can optionally access this address using Network Manager.

On You Windows Client

1. Add a new Network printer in “Printers and Faxes” from the Control Panel
2. Enter the URL address of your host’s printer, i.e., http://192.168.0.2:631/printers/Your_printer's_name. You need the :631 after your host’s address as this is the port that CUPS listens to. The Your_printer’s_name is the name of the printer you added to CUPS.

If you can’t establish a connection then check your firewall settings.

Tags: cli, virtualbox, printing, motd

Installing and Using sbotools in Slackware 15.0

Slackware was the first Linux distribution that I ever used but I was always curious and did a lot of distro-hopping from Slackware, Caldera, Turbo Linux, Mandrake, Red Hat, Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu derivatives, then Fedora for quite a while until I finally settled on…(drum roll please)…Slackware! Yeah, I’ve come full circle.

One of the reasons why I was doing so much hopping around is that I was never really happy with something about the distribution that I was currently using. Maybe it was the default colors (Ubuntu, come on with all of that orange stuff), choice of default software, difficulty with setting it up. Whatever. With Slackware it was always the (lack of) a decent package management system. That is until I found “sbotools”.

Yeah, slackpkg is there. So are a few others, like (list a few of them here). But the lack of a distribution that didn’t have dependency management in its package manager is a real pain in the backside.

So what’s the big deal? Well, one of the points of running Slackware is installing packages that you choose to install and not letting the package manager run amuck and automatically select and install a full list of dependencies without letting the user know what they are and what they do. That’s where sbotools comes in.

Klaatu talks about sbotools in his Gnu World Order Episode 473 so you can find more information about it in his review.

As sbotools is highly influenced by FreeBSD’s ports system and its pkgtools, the interface will be more or less familiar to anyone familiar with portupgrade, etc.

When you use sbotools it finds the dependencies for the software you want to install and for each one, displays what it is, what it does, and prompts you if you want to install it or not. Also, if the dependency has optional parameters it asks you if you want to see them and gives you a choice to modify them or not.

Now all of this is done in the console, which is another thing that I like about sbotools. No fancy ncurses or GUI dialogs. Just a simple console program which is handy if you’re using a headless server.

Once you are done selecting your package and providing whatever responses are required, sbotools downloads the Slackbuilds and the source code from wherever it needs to and compiles the packages one by one in the order required and installs them. If a compilation fails then it asks you if you wish to continue or quit. Then you have the option to try figuring out what went wrong but looking at the build logs or by scrolling back on the console output.

The sbotools package is not a single program but a collection of about a half a dozen programs that work very much like the BSD ports. You have a tool to initialize and fetch the latest list of packages, another to check to see if you need to update your locally installed programs, another to search for them and one to install new packages.

Installing sbotools is rather simple if you’re use to installing packages by hand in Slackware. It comes as a tz package that you install using the ‘installpkg’ command.

First you need to install the sbotools package. Then you need to “sync” the SlackBuild repository to your machine using the command:

# sbosnap fetch

This will create a git repository of all of the SlackBuilds supported by this tool (which is a lot). Now you can use the sbofind command to search for a package.

Next we will run sbocheck to see if there are any updates since the last time. In this case since this is the first time we’re using it we shouldn’t expect anything new. The example below shows the results when you do have new results:

# sbocheck
Updating SlackBuilds tree...
Updating files: 100% (44404/44404), done.
HEAD is now at 49808a413d 20230729.1 global branch merge.
Checking for updated SlackBuilds...

plexmediaserver 1.32.5.7328_2632c9d3a < needs updating (1.32.5.7349_8f4248874 from SBo)

A copy of the above result is kept in /var/log/sbocheck.log

If the above command indicates that there are updates then you can initiate an upgrade using the following command:

# sboupgrade --all
Checking for updated SlackBuilds...

OK, so now your repository is set up. Let’s use it.

Suppose we want to find a software package that can read guitar tabs:

# sbofind guitar
SBo: tuxguitar 1.5.1
Path: /usr/sbo/repo/audio/tuxguitar

SBo: guitarix 0.44.1
Path: /usr/sbo/repo/audio/guitarix

We received two results. Let’s query their details:

# sbofind -r guitarix
SBo: guitarix 0.44.1
Path: /usr/sbo/repo/audio/guitarix
README:
guitarix (virtual guitar amplifier for jack)

guitarix offers the range of sounds you would expect from a
full-featured universal guitar-amp. You can get crisp clean-sounds,
nice overdrive, fat distortion and a diversity of crazy sounds never
heard before. Guitarix can be used as a standalone application, as
LADSPA plugins, or as LV2 plugins.

For 32-bit x86, a CPU with SSE instructions is required. For other
architectures, SSE will be used if available.

meterbridge is an optional runtime dependency.

Starting with version 0.35.4, guitarix's 'Online presets' feature no
longer requires webkitgtk. See README.online for more information.

This package uses POSIX filesystem capabilities to execute with
elevated privileges (required for realtime audio processing). This
may be considered a security/stability risk. Please read
http://www.slackbuilds.org/caps/ for more information. To disable
capabilities, pass SETCAP=no to the script.

root@slacker:~# sbofind -r tuxguitar
SBo: tuxguitar 1.5.1
Path: /usr/sbo/repo/audio/tuxguitar
README:
TuxGuitar is a multitrack guitar tablature editor and player written
in Java-SWT. It can open GuitarPro, PowerTab, and TablEdit files.

Ah, looks like tuxguitar is the one we want. So let’s install it:

# sboinstall tuxguitar

This is a SlackBuild to repackage the Azul's Zulu build of OpenJDK that
is compliant with the Java SE 8 standard.

Before installing this package please consider any other jdk's/jre's
that you have already installed as they may cause conflicts with the
PATH, JAVA_HOME and MANPATH variables.

After installing the package you will need to logout/reboot your machine
as it will add files to the /etc/profile.d folder.

Note: zulu-openjdk8 does not have a browser plugin nor support for Java
Network Launching Protocol (JNLP).

Proceed with zulu-openjdk8? [y] n

I already have a different version of Java installed so I will skip this part

TuxGuitar is a multitrack guitar tablature editor and player written
in Java-SWT. It can open GuitarPro, PowerTab, and TablEdit files.

Proceed with tuxguitar? [y]
tuxguitar added to install queue.

Install queue: tuxguitar

Are you sure you wish to continue? [y]

Slackware package /tmp/tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz created.


+==============================================================================
| Installing new package /tmp/tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
+==============================================================================

Verifying package tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz.
Installing package tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz:
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
# tuxguitar (A Multitrack tablature editor and player)
#
# TuxGuitar is a multitrack guitar tablature editor and player
# written in Java-SWT. It can open GuitarPro, PowerTab, and
# TablEdit files.
#
Executing install script for tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz.
Package tuxguitar-1.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz installed.
Cleaning for tuxguitar-1.5.1...
#

So, sboinstall will not install any package without telling you first and it will describe what the packages does and if there are any additional (optional or otherwise) command line parameters which it will prompt you for.

Once you respond to the last prompt it will download and install (and compile if necessary) all of the packages you requested. If it fails one of the installations it will ask you if it should continue. If it succeeds in installing all of the packages then you’re ready to start using your software.

Each of the command line tools has it’s own manpage. Have fun!

Tags: cli, slackware, sbotools, slackbuilds, motd

Sorting Stuff in the VIM Buffer

Suppose I have a file that I am editing in vim with the following contents:

$ cat file.txt
Red 4
Blue 3
Green 1
Orange 7
Black 8
Yellow 6
Purple 2
White 5

If I want to sort this data in vim, the first thing to do is to format it into columns using the column command:

:%!column -t

Which will put the data in the following format:

Red	4
Blue	3
Green	1
Orange	7
Black	8
Yellow	6
Purple	2
White	5

Then we can sort on the 2nd column using the sort command:

:%!sort -k2nr

Which will update the buffer like this:

Black	8
Orange	7
Yellow	6
White	5
Red	4
Blue	3
Purple	2
Green	1

Tags: cli, vim, sort, motd

Using crontab

Crontab is a utility found on Linux and UNIX that allows you to schedule repetitive tasks on your system, like backups, updates, etc.

The crontab command manages a table containing specially formatted lines of text which is processed periodically by the system. Each line consists of a “schedule” followed by one or more commands to be processed at the scheduled time.

If you want to use the vim, emacs or nano editor for editing cron jobs, then, set the following in your environment and in your ~/.bash_profile file:

EDITOR=vim

Then, to edit the default cron job, as root enter this:

# crontab -e

If this is the first time you are editing the crontab, you may want to put in the following header as a reminder or a template of the format:

#MINUTE(0-59) HOUR(0-23) DAYOFMONTH(1-31) MONTHOFYEAR(1-12) DAYOFWEEK(0-6)
#Note that 0=Sun and 7=Sun
#14,15 10 * * 0 /usr/bin/somecommmand >/dev/null 2>&1

The sample “commented out command” will run at 10:14 and 10:15 every Sunday. There will be no mail sent to the user because of the >/dev/null 2>&1 entry.

To list all cron jobs enter:

# crontab -l

If you’re logged in as root you can view or edit the crontab entries of any of the users:

# crontab -l -u <username>
# crontab -e -u <username>

You can also run jobs on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis by adding shell scripts into one or more of the following directories:

• /etc/cron.hourly/
• /etc/cron.daily/
• /etc/cron.weekly/
• /etc/cron.monthly/

You can find out more information on the crontab manpage.

Tags: cli, crontab, motd

Ansible Cheatsheet

Ping all hosts:

$ ansible all -i hosts -m ping

Ping a specific host:

$ ansible raspberry-pi -m ping

Check uptime on all hosts:

$ ansible -m shell -a 'uptime' all

Check uname on all hosts:

$ ansible -m shell -a 'uname -a' all

Run playbook on more than one host:

$ ansible-playbook playbook1.yml -l 'host1.com,host2com'

Enable Debug and Increase Verbosity in Ansible

$ ANSIBLE_DEBUG=true ANSIBLE_VERBOSITY=4 ansible-playbook playbook.yml

Tags: cli, ansible, motd

Mounting an ISO Image as a File System

If you need to get one or more files from an ISO image and don’t have a CD/DVD drive you can mount the ISO image to a directory and navigate to the file(s) you need using a terminal or file explorer. You’ll have to do this as root.

# mkdir /mnt/iso
# mount -o loop -t iso9660 /home/user/Downloads/Custom-Build/custom.iso /mnt/iso
mount: /mnt/iso: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.
# cd /mnt/iso/
# ls
DateBuilt System/ boot/ boot.catalog efi.img initrd linux mach_kernel slint.txt
#

When you’re done just unmount the location:

# umount /mnt/iso/
#

Tags: cli, mount, iso, motd

Using sSMTP on Slackware 15.0

How to Install and Use ssmtp to Send Emails from the Linux Terminal

ssmtp is a simple utility that can be used to send emails from a Linux system to a specified email address. It is just an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent); it does not receive mail, expand aliases, or manage a queue. Instead, it forwards automated emails to an external email address. This can be useful for forwarding system alerts or other automated emails from your system to an external email address.

According to the SlackBuild comments:

sSMTP, replaces sendmail on workstations that should send their mail via the departmental mailhub from which they pick up their mail (via pop, imap, rsmtp, pop_fetch, NFS… or the like). This program accepts mail and sends it to the mailhub, optionally replacing the domain in the From: line with a different one.

Normally, when using ssmtp, you want to remove the OS’s MTA package(s), sendmail and/or postfix. In this case, ssmtp will be symlinked to /usr/sbin/sendmail, and software that sends mail shouldn’t have to be modified. If you keep sendmail/postfix installed, there’s no conflict, but any software that sends mail will have to be configured or modified to use /usr/sbin/ssmtp.

NOTE: After installing, you’ll want to edit “/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf”. There’s a man page for it (man ssmtp.conf).

In this post, we’ll show you how to install and use ssmtp to send an email from the command-line interface.

Step 1: Install ssmtp

By default, the ssmtp package is not included in the default install of Slackware but you can install it by running the following command if you use sbotools:

# sboinstall ssmtp

Step 2: Configure ssmtp

Next, you’ll need to define your Gmail or other SMTP servers in the ssmtp configuration file. You can do this by editing the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file:

vim /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

Add the following lines:

UseSTARTTLS=YES
root=user@your-isp.com
mailhub=smtp-mail.your-isp.com:587
rewriteDomain=192.168.1.12
hostname=192.168.1.12
FromLineOverride=YES
AuthUser=user@your-isp.com
AuthPass=your-email-password
AuthMethod=LOGIN

Save and close the file when you’re finished. ssmtp is now configured to use your SMTP server address to send an email.

Also modify the revaliases file in the same directory. A reverse alias gives the From: address placed on a user’s outgoing messages and (optionally) the mailhub these messages will be sent through. Example:

root:jdoe@isp.com:mail.isp.com

Messages root sends will be identified as from jdoe@isp.com and sent through mail.isp.com.

$ cat /etc/ssmtp/revaliases
# sSMTP aliases
#
# Format: local_account:outgoing_address:mailhub
#
# Example: root:your_login@your.domain:mailhub.your.domain[:port]
# where [:port] is an optional port number that defaults to 25.
user:user@your-isp.com:smtp.your-isp.com:587

Step 3: Send an Email with ssmtp

First, create a text file and write some content:

vim file.txt

Add the following lines:

Subject: This is Subject Line

Email content line 1
Email content line 2

Save and close the file, then send an email with attachment file.txt to the external address user@your-isp.com:

ssmtp -v user@your-isp.com < file.txt

If everything is fine, you should see output indicating that the email was sent successfully.

And that’s it! You’ve successfully installed and used ssmtp to send an email from the Linux terminal. This can be a useful tool for sending automated emails from your system to an external email address.

Tags: cli, ssmtp, email, motd

How To Get Information on Linux

The manpages are historically the place to go for any information about the software and utilities installed on a Linux machine. I believe that the info page seems to be the best place for newbies to go because it is so much easier to navigate, and, like manpages, it is a still a great place to get information about your system.

Suppose you want to get information about socket. You would type:

$ info socket

and you’d get a page that looks similar to a manpage but it can be navigated by using keyboard shortcuts:

q- exits back to the shell
u- moves up one level
n- moves to the next node on the current level
p- moves to the previous node on the current level
space- goes to the selected node under the cursor
H- lists all of the Info commands

The commands whatis and whereis are also very useful in finding information on the system.

$ whatis printf
printf (3) - formatted output conversion
printf (1) - format and print data

The whatis command will list the set of manpages for a specific keyword. The keyword printf is used in the bash shell as well as the c programming language. Here you see separate pages for each usage. To view them you would specify the section number in your command to man, i.e., $ man 3 printf or man printf (which defaults to section 1). This is the same output as entering $ man -f printf.

The whereis command will list which system files reference a specified keyword or command. For example,

$ whereis socket
socket: /usr/man/man7/socket.7.gz /usr/man/mann/socket.n.gz /usr/man/man2/socket.2.gz
$ whereis printf
printf: /usr/bin/printf /bin/printf /usr/man/man3/printf.3.gz /usr/man/man1/printf.1.gz

In case you aren’t really sure of what you’re looking for you can use a ‘keyword’ search to the man or apropos commands which will use the keyword you enter as a regex (regular expression) to find all of the matches throughout the manpages:

$ man -k printf
aa_printf (3) - print text to AA-lib output buffers.
asprintf (3) - print to allocated string
ber_printf (3) - OpenLDAP LBER simplified Basic Encoding Rules library routines f...
BIO_printf (3) - formatted output to a BIO
BIO_snprintf (3) - formatted output to a BIO
BIO_vprintf (3) - formatted output to a BIO
BIO_vsnprintf (3) - formatted output to a BIO
buffer_printf.c (3) - Buffer management functions.
curl_mprintf (3) - formatted output conversion
dprintf (3) - formatted output conversion
format (n) - Format a string in the style of sprintf
fprintf (3) - formatted output conversion
etc...

In case you are interested, the manpages are broken down into different sections as listed here:

1 General Commands
2 System Calls and Error Numbers
3 C Libraries
3p perl
4 Devices and device drivers
5 File Formats and config files
6 Game instructions
7 Miscellaneous information
8 System maintenance
9 Kernel internals

Tags: cli, man, apropos, whereis, whatis, motd

Locking Down SSH User Access

To secure your system, you shouldn’t allow root to login remotely. Instead, if an admin needs to use the root account they should login using their own account and then su - or sudo to the root account as needed.

Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and change the following lines:

PermitRootLogin no
PermitEmptyPasswords no

Some of these properties may be commented out in the file, so all you’d need to do is remove the # sign.

Once these changes are made you should then restart ssh. On my system this is done by:

# /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd restart

After the restart your changes will be in affect. However, root can still login “from the local terminal”.

You can go a step further and restrict only specific users access to login via ssh. For example, if you wanted only user1 and user2 the ability to login with ssh you can add a line to the above file:

AllowUsers user1 user2

Everyone except these two users will be denied access via ssh.

Tags: cli, ssh, ssh-config, motd

Make a File Immutable

You can use the chattr command (as root) to make a file “unalterable” so that even the root user cannot modify or delete it without using the chattr command to revert the change. This is done by using chattr’s +i and -i flags.

chattr changes a file’s attributes on a Linux file system.

Set the flag as root:

# chattr +i xrdp-notes.txt
# lsattr xrdp-notes.txt
----i---------e------- xrdp-notes.txt

A normal user can’t delete it:

$ rm xrdp-notes.txt
rm: cannot remove 'xrdp-notes.txt': Operation not permitted

Even root cannot delete it without changing the file attribute back:

# rm xrdp-notes.txt
rm: cannot remove 'xrdp-notes.txt': Operation not permitted

Once the flag is unset it can be deleted:

# chattr -i xrdp-notes.txt
# lsattr xrdp-notes.txt
--------------e------- xrdp-notes.txt
# exit
$ rm xrdp-notes.txt
$

Tags: cli, chattr, lsattr, motd

Set Mac Hostname

To set the host name of your Mac (in my case macbook-pro) in the command prompt, type the following command:

$ sudo scutil --set HostName "macbook-pro"
$ sudo scutil --set LocalHostName "macbook-pro"

Tags: macOS, cli, motd

Reset Mac Launchpad

To reset the Mac LaunchPad to default enter the following:

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db ; killall Dock

This will however put all of the Apple apps on the first page and all of your remaining apps will be sorted alphabetically on the remaining pages.

Tags: macOS, launchpad, motd

Creating a Docker Registry

Creating a docker registry is rather straightforward, but you may need to do some tweaking of your docker installation in order to get it working as indicated below.

Let’s assume that you already have docker up and running on your machine.

We are going to set up a Docker registry on our local server. This server will not have a secure connection and will only be used internally, so we will need to allow this access by creating a file in /etc/docker called daemon.json to designate this:

{
"insecure-registries":[
"localhost:5000"
]
}

Don’t forget to restart the docker daemon after making this change.

Now, create a docker volume that will persist your registry data when it goes offline:

# docker volume create /mnt/registry

This next part is optional. You can use whatever means you want to download and start the container: Create a script to download the image and start the container:

# mkdir /mnt/registry
# cat >start-registry.sh <<"EOF"
> docker run -d \
> -p 5000:5000 \
> --restart=always \
> --name registry \
> -v /mnt/registry:/var/lib/registry \
> registry:2
> EOF

Now start the registry (using the above script):

# ./start-registry.sh

Now, let’s test it by pushing a sample hello-world image to the registry:

$ docker tag hello-world:latest localhost:5000/hello-world:latest
$ docker push localhost:5000/hello-world:latest
The push refers to repository [localhost:5000/hello-world]
e07ee1baac5f: Pushed
latest: digest: sha256:f54a58bc1aac5ea1a25d796ae155dc228b3f0e11d046ae276b39c4bf2f13d8c4 size: 525

NOTE: If you are pushing to this registry from another server you need to add the following to /etc/docker/daemon.json and restart docker before you will be able to do a push (replace localhost with the IP address of the server that’s running the registry):

{
"insecure-registries":[
"localhost:5000"
]
}

Now we can use curl to list the repositories in the registry:

curl localhost:5000/v2/_catalog

More information about creating a docker registry can be found here and if you’re interested in setting up authentication for your private registry you can find more information here

Tags: cli, docker, registry, motd

Using rsync to Sync Two Directories

You can sync two directories using rsync tool. The following command:

$ rsync -a -v --delete sending_directory target_directory;

will copy sending_directory to target_directory creating a directory structure of sending_directory/target_directory. The --delete flag will ensure that any files that were previously in sending_directory/target_directory that are not in sending_directory will be deleted so that the contents of the two directories are the same.

Tags: cli, rsync, backups, motd

Move Files Older Than So Many Days with Find

You may want to clean up a directory that has files older than a certain number of days, for example, 30 days. You can do this with the find command:

To move files older than 30 days in current folder to the old folder:

$ find . -mtime +30 -exec mv {} old/ \;

Tags: cli, find, mtime, mv, motd

Build, Tag, and Push a Docker Image with One Command

You can build, tag, and push a docker image to a remote all in one command with the –quiet parameter on docker build, which only outputs the SHA256 hash (annoyingly prefixed with SHA256:, but nothing a little cutting can’t fix).

$ docker tag $(docker build . -q | cut -c 8-999) myregid/imagename:1.0.1 && docker push myregid/imagename

Tags: cli, docker, motd

Vim Tips: Searching a File for Multiple Strings

In Vim you can perform a search like this: /string1/;/string2

This will will combine two searches. It tells Vim:

1. Search for string1, then
2. From there search for string2 on any line that also contains string1.

Tags: cli, vim, search, motd

Using RClone to Mount Your OneDrive Folder in Linux

If you have a Microsoft Office 365 account you know that it comes with 1TB of storage. You can use RClone to mount your OneDrive locally on your Linux machine so that you can read and write documents stored there.

1. Install rclone from whatever package repository that your Linux operating system uses.
2. Follow the instructions here to configure your OneDrive environment. The instructions are rather straightforward and a couple pieces of extra advice follows:

In the first section, type n for a new installation and give your mountpoint a name:

$ rclone config
No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q>n
name> remote

In the next section just press enter to accept the default:

Type of storage to configure.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").

Now you have to choose the vendor of the service you’re configuring. There are a lot of selections hereso just look for Microsoft OneDrive, in my case it was 26:

Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / 1Fichier
\ "fichier"
2 / Alias for an existing remote
\ "alias"
etc.
25 / Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
\ "azureblob"
26 / Microsoft OneDrive
\ "onedrive"
27 / OpenDrive
\ "opendrive"
28 / OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
\ "swift"
Storage> 26

The next couple of selections are just the default, so press the Enter key:

OAuth Client Id
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_id>
OAuth Client Secret
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_secret>

Now select the global choice:

Choose national cloud region for OneDrive.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("global").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Microsoft Cloud Global
\ "global"
2 / Microsoft Cloud for US Government
\ "us"
3 / Microsoft Cloud Germany
\ "de"
4 / Azure and Office 365 operated by 21Vianet in China
\ "cn"
region> 1

Select the default here:

Edit advanced config? (y/n)
y) Yes
n) No (default)
y/n> n

Select the default here:

Remote config
Use auto config?
* Say Y if not sure
* Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes (default)
n) No
y/n> y

Now the browser should open and you should provide your Microsoft credentials:

If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth?state=<some long key here>

Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code

Select 1 for Personal or Business:

Choose a number from below, or type in an existing value
1 / OneDrive Personal or Business
\ "onedrive"
2 / Root Sharepoint site
\ "sharepoint"
3 / Sharepoint site name or URL (e.g. mysite or https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/mysite)
\ "url"
4 / Search for a Sharepoint site
\ "search"
5 / Type in driveID (advanced)
\ "driveid"
6 / Type in SiteID (advanced)
\ "siteid"
7 / Sharepoint server-relative path (advanced, e.g. /teams/hr)
\ "path"
Your choice> 1

Select the drive number from the list, there will probably be only one to choose from, and then select the default:

Found 1 drives, please select the one you want to use:
0: (personal) id=<id key>
Chose drive to use:> 0
Found drive 'root' of type 'personal', URL: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=<id key>
Is that okay?
y) Yes (default)
n) No
y/n> y

Now rclone will list out the configuration information and ask for confirmation. If all looks good then select y and you’re done:

--------------------
[remote]
type = onedrive
region = global
token = <some long token string here>

drive_id = <some long token string here>

drive_type = personal
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK (default)
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y
Current remotes:

Name Type
==== ====
remote onedrive

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

3. Now you should be able to list the contents of the OneDrive directory on the console:

$ rclone lsd remote:
-1 2023-06-23 04:15:30 3 .Trash-1000
-1 2023-07-23 15:21:03 1 Apps
-1 2017-09-20 15:34:22 0 Attachments
-1 2023-07-04 23:53:04 0 Desktop
-1 2023-07-23 14:33:10 472 Documents
-1 2023-07-22 02:43:07 135 Documents from Macbook
-1 2019-11-08 21:22:23 0 Email attachments
-1 2019-11-08 21:22:23 0 Movies
-1 2023-07-23 03:39:57 53 Music
-1 2023-07-02 16:34:04 37 Pictures
-1 2022-05-24 10:39:02 2 Public
-1 2021-08-01 13:47:30 2 SyncFusion
-1 2023-06-20 11:41:24 4 Videos

If for some reason it isn’t mounted you can mount it manually with the following command:

$ rclone --vfs-cache-mode writes mount remote: ~/OneDrive &
[2] 69267

Tags: cli, rclone, onedrive, motd

Find the IP Addresses of KVM Virtual Machines (Command Line)

To find details about the virtual network you can use these commands:

root@slacker:~# virsh net-list
Name State Autostart Persistent
--------------------------------------------
default active yes yes

root@slacker:~# virsh net-info default
Name: default
UUID: 14a90f27-9a85-42ca-b434-6ce6c142690c
Active: yes
Persistent: yes
Autostart: yes
Bridge: virbr0

root@slacker:~# virsh net-dhcp-leases default
Expiry Time MAC address Protocol IP address Hostname Client ID or DUID
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2023-07-22 16:18:45 52:54:00:dd:7b:62 ipv4 192.168.122.216/24 centos7-bbk -

You will find the IP address and hostname listed in the last command’s output.

Optionally, to find the network interfaces’s addresses for a running domain called centos7-bbk:

root@slacker:~# virsh list
Id Name State
-----------------------------
3 centos7-bbk running

root@slacker:~# virsh domifaddr centos7-bbk
Name MAC address Protocol Address
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vnet2 52:54:00:dd:7b:62 ipv4 192.168.122.216/24

root@slacker:~#

Tags: cli, kvm, virsh, networking, motd

SSH Escape Sequences

Have you ever had an SSH connection timeout on you and you’re left with what looks like a locked session. Repeatedly hitting the Enter key does nothing. It seems that there is nothing that you can do except close the console terminal session…or is there something else?

Many people are not aware that SSH has its own set of keyboard shortcuts. The solution to the above problem is to terminate the connection using the first of these shortcuts.

1. Press the Enter key.
2. Press the tilde followed by a period.
3. Press Enter again. You should now be back at your command prompt.

Supported escape sequences:
~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~R - request rekey
~V/v - decrease/increase verbosity (LogLevel)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

It is important to note that you always press the Enter key before typing the key sequences above.

Tags: cli, ssh, shortcuts, motd

View lshw Output as a HTML Page

You can use the lshw command to output your hardware configuration to an html file by passing the -html parameter to it:

$ sudo lshw -html >hardware.html

Tags: cli, lshw, html, motd

List TCP Connections Sorted By Host and Most Connections

Assuming your system still has netstat installed (Slackware 15.0 does :^), you can summarize the TCP connections on you host using the following command:

$ netstat -ntu|awk '{print $5}'|cut -d: -f1 -s|sort|uniq -c|sort -nk1 -r

3 52.50.230.xxx
3 104.18.27.xxx
3 104.18.26.xxx
2 205.166.94.xx
2 192.168.1.xx
2 142.251.40.xxx
2 104.18.13.xx
1 74.120.9.xxx
1 66.255.245.xxx
1 54.154.65.xxx
1 52.96.182.xxx
1 45.56.116.xxx
1 45.33.73.xxx
1 34.117.65.xx
1 20.190.135.xx
1 192.168.122.xxx
1 192.168.1.xx
1 172.253.63.xxx
1 162.159.61.x
1 162.125.21.x
1 142.251.40.xxx
1 142.251.32.xxx
1 142.251.16.xxx
1 127.0.0.x

Tags: cli, networking, netstat, motd

Test If a Port is Open with Bash

If netcat isn’t available on your machine and you don’t have the priviledge to install it you can use this trick to test if a port is open or not. It will throw a connection refused message if a port is closed.

$ : </dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/80

And you can use it in a script like this:

(: </dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/80) &>/dev/null && echo "OPEN" || echo "CLOSED"

Tags: cli, networking, bash, motd

Recover Your Wi-Fi Password from Windows CLI

In case you misplaced your wi-fi password you can recover it very easily using 2 commands on Windoze:

Open the Terminal or PowerShell

PS C:\Users\user> netsh wlan show profile

The output will be similar to this. You need to obtain the User Profile of the connection that you’re interested in:

Profiles on interface Wi-Fi:

Group policy profiles (read only)
---------------------------------
<None>

User profiles
-------------
All User Profile : ROUTER21
All User Profile : 4YWD8-5G
All User Profile : 4YWD8

OK, so we know we have 3 profiles. Run the next command with the profile you’re interested in:

PS C:\Users\user> netsh wlan show profile name="ROUTER21" key=clear

You’ll get a bunch of output, but what you’re interested in is the field named Key Content in the Security settings section which holds the wi-fi password in cleartext:

Profile ROUTER21 on interface Wi-Fi:
:
blah blah blah
:
Connectivity settings
---------------------
Number of SSIDs : 1
SSID name : "ROUTER21"
Network type : Infrastructure
Radio type : [ Any Radio Type ]
Vendor extension : Not present

Security settings
-----------------
Authentication : WPA2-Personal
Cipher : CCMP
Authentication : WPA2-Personal
Cipher : GCMP
Security key : Present
Key Content : mywifitpassword
:
blah blah blah
:
:

Tags: cli, wi-fi, networking, motd

Prefix The Output of Any Command with a Timestamp

You can prefix the output of every line with a timestamp by piping the command to the following sed command:

$ command | sed "s/^/\[date +“%Y%m%d%H%M%S”]/"

Tags: cli, sed, motd

Create a QEMU/KVM Virtual Machine from the Command Line

You can use a combination of command line tools to create and configure a virtual machine. Here we will use few tools from the QEMU and libvirt packages to do this.

Use QEMU to create a 15GB QCOW disk image:

$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 /home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2 15G
Formatting '/home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zlib size=16106127360 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16

Start the installation:

$ sudo virt-install --name=CentOS-Stream-9 --vcpus=1 --memory=1024 --location=/home/user/Downloads/CentOS-Stream-9-20230704.1-x86_64-boot.iso --os-variant=centos8 --network bridge:virbr0 --disk path=/home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2 --disk size=15
Password:
WARNING Requested memory 1024 MiB is less than the recommended 1536 MiB for OS centos8

Starting install...
Retrieving 'vmlinuz' | 0 B 00:00:00 ...
Retrieving 'initrd.img' | 0 B 00:00:00 ...
Allocating 'CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2' | 2.5 MB 00:00:03 ...
WARNING Overriding memory to 3072 MiB needed for centos8 network install.
Creating domain... | 0 B 00:00:00
Running graphical console command: virt-viewer --connect qemu:///system --wait CentOS-Stream-9

Once this gets to this point another window should open up by the virt-viewer application (which you should install if you didn’t already) and you can complete the installation and reboot. You’ll use the same virt-viewer window to use the shell or desktop (depending upon the distro you installed).

When you are done and close the virt-viewer GUI you can find the VM in the running state using virsh:

$ sudo virsh list --all
Password:
Id Name State
------------------------------------
5 CentOS-Stream-9 running
- slackware-current shut off

Then you can shut it down:

$ sudo virsh shutdown 5
Password:
Domain '5' is being shutdown
$ sudo virsh list --all
Password:
Id Name State
------------------------------------
- CentOS-Stream-9 shut off
- slackware-current shut off

Optionally, you can delete the VM domain and the QCOW file using the undefine parameter:

$ sudo virsh undefine --domain CentOS-Stream-9 --remove-all-storage
Password:
Domain 'CentOS-Stream-9' has been undefined
Volume 'vda'(/home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2) removed.

Tags: cli, qemu, kvm, motd

Using passwordgen On Slackware

The well known ss64.com site has a lot of useful tips and tricks for **nix* users and they also have a script that you can download which will create and maintain passwords for you.

If you go to their command line section you can use the link to their GitHub site and download it for yourself. However, when I followed their installation instructions I ran into difficulty because the script has a dependency on pbcopy or gclip (which wasn’t documented) and since I run Slackware 15.0 the copy to clipboard feature failed.

The workaround for this is to install either xclip or xsel from Slackbuilds.org and make a minor modification to the script as described here:

22c22,23
< which gclip pbcopy | grep -v -m 1 'not found'
---
> which xclip xsel | grep -v -m 1 'not found'
>
52c53
< ss64pwd_to_clipboard $one_arg
---
> ss64pwd_to_clipboard -selecton clipboard $one_arg

Tags: cli, password-managers, motd

Rename Files That Start With a Special Character

Suppose you find that you have a file with a special character and you want to delete it:

$ ls
-badfile.txt PrintHood reg57.txt
Favorites Recent scripts

$ rm -badfile.txt
rm: invalid option -- 'b'
Try 'rm ./-badfile.txt' to remove the file '-badfile.txt'.
Try 'rm --help' for more information.

$ ls *.txt
ls: invalid option -- 'e'
Try 'ls --help' for more information.

First, find the inode of the file by using ls -i on the command line:

$ ls -i
54804119 -badfile.txt 56634824 PrintHood
56634825 Recent 56634807 Favorites
54804251 reg57.txt 56634833 scripts

The “-i” flag will display the file’s inode:
54804119 -badfile.txt

The inode for the “bad” file is 54804119. Once the inode is identified, use the find command to rename the file:

$ find . -inum 54804119 -exec mv {} NewName \;

$ ls NewName
NewName

Now you can delete it.

$ rm NewName

Tags: cli, rename, find, inode, motd

scp’ing Files using a Text File List

If you have a collection of files that you want to transfer to a remote server and they are a subset of files in the current directory or scattered among different directories you can create a list of files and then pipe the list to scp:

$ cat filelist.txt | xargs -i scp {} user@remote:~/backup/

Tags: cli, xargs, scp, motd

How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -1 | cut -f2- -d" "

Tags: cli, find, sort, tail, cut, motd

Bind to a Remote Port Using SSH

If you are trying to access the web page of an application running on a remote machine and you find that you are blocked, you can bind to it using SSH with similar parameters to this:

$ ssh pi@raspberrypi.local -L 8384:127.0.0.1:8384 -N

Where:

• pi@raspberrypi.local is the remote server,
• 8384 is the port number on the remote that you wish to connect with,
• 127.0.0.1:8384 is the local machine and the port that you want to redirect to, and
• -N is a flag telling ssh not to execute a remote command.

Tags: cli, ssh, motd

Using Tar with a Text Input File

If you have a lot of files in a directory and you only need to tar a subset of them you can create a list of the files you want in a text file and pass it to the tar command like this:

$ tar -cvf tarball.tar -T filelist.txt

or

$ tar cvf tarball.tar $(cat filelist.txt)

Tags: cli, tar, motd

Command Line Redirection

Redirection is very significant in shell scripting. It provides you a means to save the output of a command to a file or multiple files (one for stdout and one for stderr).

Below is a table of simple redirections that are the most useful in shell scripting. Here we are using the following naming conventions:

• stdout – The output of the script/command
• stderr – The errors generated by the script/command
• outfile – A target filename where you wish to store the output
• errfile – A target filename where you wish to store the errors

Command	Description/Purpose
command 2>errfile	Redirect stderr to errfile
command >outfile 2>errfile	Redirect stderr to file named errfile and stdout to file named outfile
command &> outfile	Redirect stderr and stdout to outfile
command 2>&-	Just suppress error messages. No file created. No error message displayed on screen
command 2>&1	Redirect error messages to standard output. Useful in shell script when you need to forcefully display error messages on screen

Tags: cli, bash, scripting, redirection, motd

Backup Files with Specific File Extension

Here is how you can use rsync to backup only the .ogg files in the Music directory to the OGG directory:

$ rsync -a --prune-empty-dirs --include='*/' --include='*.ogg' --exclude='*' Music/ OGG/

Tags: cli, rsync, backups, motd

Some sed Tips

Put an * between the number 5 and 6

$ echo '12345678901234567890'| sed -e 's/^.\{5\}/&*/'
12345*678901234567890

Put a comma between each number

$ echo "1234567890" |sed -e 's/./&,/g' -e 's/,$//'
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0

Put comma after every 2, if not even then last number exist by itself

$ echo "1234567890" |sed -e 's/../&,/g' -e 's/,$//'
12,34,56,78,90

Double space the data in file data1

$ sed G data1

Triple space the data file file data1

$ sed 'G;G' data1

Single space a double spaced file

$ sed 'n;d' data1

DOS to Linux conversion

$ sed 's/.$//' DOSfile >Linuxfile

Truncate everything after a substring (‘with’ in this case):

$ cat file.txt
Brown Potatoes with Cheese
Yellow Potatoes with Sugar and Cheese
$ sed -i.bak 's/with.*//g' file.txt
$ cat file.txt
Brown Potatoes
Yellow Potatoes

Tags: cli, sed, motd

Slackware Current: Minimal Installation

I’ve been looking for a way to install a minimal version of Slackware (current) in a VM and the smallest that I’ve safely come up with so far is this:

• Package group A
• Package group AP
• Package group D
• Package group F
• Package group K
• Package group L
• Package group N

I will try to get it smaller but I need this startup environment for another experiment so I’ll settle for this. Yes, it is still a wopping 12GB. Geez…

More info here

Tags: slackware, distros, motd

Red Hat Subscription Service

Once you have installed RHEL 9, register your RHEL subscription by running the following command on the terminal. The username and password are the login details to your Red Hat account.

$ sudo subscription-manager register --username=username --password=password

To confirm that the system is registered to Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM), run the command:

$ sudo subscription-manager list --installed

Then refresh and subscribe:

$ sudo subscription-manager refresh
$ sudo subscription-manager attach --auto

Or, list the subscriptions that are available:

$ subscription-manager list --available --all
$ subscription-manager attach --pool=<POOL_ID>

Unregistering a system:

$ subscription-manager remove --all
$ subscription-manager unregister
$ subscription-manager clean

Tags: cli, rhel, motd

Speed Up DNF Package Manager

You can increase the download speed for installing packages using DNF by updating the maximum number of simultaneous package downloads.

Start by editing the /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file:

$ sudo nano /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

Add the following line to enable DNF parallel downloads:

max_parallel_downloads=10

Another option is to select the fastest mirror from the Fedora public mirrors by adding the following line:

fastestmirror=True

Tags: cli, dnf, fedora, rhel, package-managers, motd

Creating a Python requirements.txt File

This can be done quickly by typing:

$ pip freeze >requirements.txt

at the command line.

To install packages using a requirements file just use pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

To check if the packages in your requirements.txt file are up-to-date use:

$ pip list --outdated

and to update those packages:

$ pip install -U <packagename>

This process has some drawbacks as packages are sometimes included that are no longer needed and should only be used initially and then maintained manually.

Tags: cli, python, pip, requirements, motd

Python: Initializing a New Project using venv

Start out by creating a new directory or cloning a repository (which creates a directory) and cd into it:

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/username/proj-name
$ cd proj-name/

Initialize the virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Install whatever dependencies you need:

$ pip install package1 package2

Then develop and/or run your program:

$ python data_model.py
$ python app.py
$ sqlite3 hpr.sqlite "select count(*) from users"

When you’re done working you can deactivate the environment by typing:

$ deactivate

Tags: cli, python, venv, virtual, environment, motd

Printing Numbers using Thousand Separators

You can use a pipe to awk to output numbers with thousands separators (commas). For Example, here’s how you can total the 5th column of the ls -l command and print it with thousands separators:

$ ls -l | awk '{total = total + $5}END{print total}' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 awk '{printf("%'"'"'d\n", $0) }'
21,387

This can be adapted to other commands as necessary.

Tags: cli, bash, awk, motd

GCC can’t find stdio.h in Alpine Linux

A while ago, I installed the iSH app on my iPad which made it possible for me to develop Python and C code as well as use it as an SSH client. However, I ran into an issue when trying to compile C code because the compiler couldn’t resolve stdio.h. The following excerpt from StackOverflow resolves the issue:

Install libc-dev in addition to GCC, or just install build-base for everything (alpine-sdk is probably an overkill). To install run the following command:

# apk add libc-dev

You need to install it separately because in Alpine Linux, the package GCC doesn’t depend on libc-dev for good reason: You can use gcc to compile things without libc, for example hypervisors firmware etc.

Tags: gcc, alpine-linux, ipad, ish, motd

Ubuntu: Disable cloud-init on Startup

In systems that use systemd and have a current (17.0+) version of cloud-init, upstream documentation describes the process for disabling cloud-init with either of the following:

* touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled

or,

* add cloud-init=disabled to the kernel command line.

Tags: cli, ubuntu, cloud-init, motd

Red Hat Subscripion Manager - Registering

Registering your RHEL instance with Red Hat is straightforward assuming that you already have an account:

# subscription-manager register --username <your-rh-user> --password <password>

List the available repos or just go with a default:

# subscription-manager list --available
# subscription-manager attach --auto

Then you can do your update:

# yum update

Tags: cli, rhel, motd

RHEL QCOW Image Password

Did you know that although you can install RHEL from an ISO, you can also download a QCOW2 image from Red Hat. However, when you try to start it up under virt-manager you’ll see that it boots to a root prompt and you don’t know what the password is. This can be fixed by running the following from the host’s terminal:

# virt-customize -a <qcow2-image-file-name> --root-password password:<password>

Tags: cli, rhel, qcow, motd

Find System Hogs and Child Processes

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you to do this that are both GUI or command line-based but sometimes you’re on a production server that may have limited tools and sometimes the simplest tools are best in cases like this.

List the processes that are not owned by you that are using a lot of CPU:

$ ps aux --sort=-%cpu | grep -m 8 -vwhoami

or by memory:

$ ps aux --sort=-%mem | grep -m 8 -vwhoami

or by longest running process:

$ ps aux --sort=-time | grep -m 8 -vwhoami

List processes by a specific user:

$ ps -U gszumo

or multiple users:

$ ps -U gszumo -U katy

You can see child proceses:

$ ps -eo pid,args --forest

or children of a specific process:

$ ps -f --ppid 4775

I don’t remember where I found these tips but they have come in handy on many occasions and I am documenting them here hoping that readers (whatever few there are) will also benefit from them.

Tags: cli, ps, processes, motd

How to List Installed Packages in Fedora, RHEL, CentOS

Listing installed packages with YUM:

$ sudo yum list installed

To display details about a package:

$ yum info nginx

You can cat all installed packages to a file, copy the file to another machine and duplicate the system:

$ sudo yum list installed > installed-packages.txt
$ sudo yum -y install $(cat installed-packages.txt)

List installed packages with RPM:

$ sudo rpm -qa

List them by installation date:

$ sudo rpm -qa --last

Display information about a package:

$ rpm -qi nginx

Tags: cli, rpm, yum, rhel, fedora, motd

Git: Deleting Multiple Commits

Let’s say that you want to delete the last 3 commits that you’ve already pushed to the remote repository. In this example, you want 566dab6 to be the new HEAD revision.

$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
57bc36b (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) 3nd set of bad entries on 6th commit
dfb4bd3 2nd set of bad entries on 5th commit
0fd1e16 First set of bad entries on 4th commit
566dab6 Yet more good entries on third commit
d50370a More good entries on second commit
b5fbc6d Good entries on first commit
2cad4c7 Initial commit

You can use git reset, git revert, or git checkout to achieve this goal.

Using reset:

$ git reset --hard HEAD~3

$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
566dab6 (HEAD -> master) Yet more good entries on third commit
d50370a More good entries on second commit
b5fbc6d Good entries on first commit
2cad4c7 Initial commit

Then you have to force push to the origin:

$ git push --force

Using revert:

$ git revert --no-commit 57bc36b
$ git revert --no-commit dfb4bd3
$ git revert --no-commit 0fd1e16

or do all 3 at once:

$ git revert --no-commit HEAD~3..

Then do the commit:

$ git commit -m "Fixed commits"

$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
0da0f42 (HEAD -> master) Fixed commits
57bc36b 3nd set of bad entries on 6th commit
dfb4bd3 2nd set of bad entries on 5th commit
0fd1e16 First set of bad entries on 4th commit
566dab6 Yet more good entries on third commit
d50370a More good entries on second commit
b5fbc6d Good entries on first commit
2cad4c7 Initial commit

Using checkout:

Checkout that revision over the top of local files

$ git checkout -f 566dab6 -- .
$ git commit -a

$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
0da0f42 (HEAD -> master) Fixed commits
57bc36b 3nd set of bad entries on 6th commit
dfb4bd3 2nd set of bad entries on 5th commit
0fd1e16 First set of bad entries on 4th commit
566dab6 Yet more good entries on third commit
d50370a More good entries on second commit
b5fbc6d Good entries on first commit
2cad4c7 Initial commit

Tags: cli, git, source-control, motd

Solus OS: Prevent Laptop from Sleeping When Closing the Lid

If you’re using a laptop with an external monitor and you’ve recently installed Solus OS you might have noticed that the laptop goes to sleep when you close the lid and there is no way to adjust for this in the power settings. You can get around this by manually editing /etc/systemd/logind.conf, then uncommenting and changing the line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

to

HandleLidSwitch=ignore

Note: The ‘#’ (comment) at the beginning of the line needs to be removed and the value needs to be changed from suspend to ignore.

Tags: linux, solus, power, motd

Speed Up Firefox

If you are experiencing tearing while using Firefox you may want to see if graphics accelleration is enabled on the browser. You can try this tip to force hardware accelleration on in the browser.

First, check to make sure that your Linux desktop installation supports it by running the following command and making sure that direct rendering returns Yes:

$ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes

Then, open Firefox if it’s not already running, and enter about:config in the address bar. Click Accept The Risk And Continue when prompted, to get to the Firefox Advanced Configuration Editor

Search for “layers.acceleration.force-enabled” and you should then see it listed in the results.

Click the right and left pointing arrow icon associated with the entry until false changes to true. Once that’s taken care of, close and restart Firefox.

If you don’t see layers.acceleration.force-enabled listed, you’ll need to create it by right-clicking an empty area and selecting New | Boolean. Name the new entry layers.acceleration.force-enabled and set it to true. Restart Firefox and you’re done.

If you notice any issues with Firefox after that and you need to revert your change, just search again and toggle it back to false.

Some folks report that setting gfx.xrender.enabled=true and layers.acceleration.force-enabled and layers.force-active also works. YMMV ;^)

Tags: firefox, tearing, accelleration, glxinfo, direct-rendering, motd

Deleting Blank Lines Using Grep

If you have a file (or a stream) that has blank lines you want to remove, you can use this command:

$ grep -v "^ *$" file-with-blanks.txt > output-file.txt

where file-with-blanks.txt is the input file and has blank lines and output-file.txt will be the output file without the blank lines.

You have to keep the space between the ^ and the *$ otherwise blank lines which include spaces will not be removed.

Tags: cli, grep, motd

Convert webm to mp4

You can use ffmpeg to convert webm to mp4 on the command line very easily:

$ ffmpeg -i file.webm -c copy file.mp4

This will stream copy (re-mux) and avoid re-encoding.

Tags: cli, ffmpeg, webm, mp4, convert, video, motd

Install KDbg - A KDE gdb GUI on Slackware 15.0

What is KDbg?

From the homepage:

KDbg is a graphical user interface to gdb, the GNU debugger. It provides an intuitive interface for setting breakpoints, inspecting variables, and stepping through code.

KDbg requires KDE, the K Desktop Environment, but you can of course debug any program.

Here’s how to install it on Slackware 15 but this should work on any system that has KDE:

$ git clone -b maint https://github.com/j6t/kdbg.git
$ cd kdbg/
$ cmake .
$ make
$ su -c "make install"

Tags: debugging, gdb, kde, slackware, motd

Exporting your Pocket List Data

The links you save to your Pocket are stored on Pocket’s servers. In other words, they’re stored “in the cloud”.

This means that your List will be available on any computer or mobile device (phone or tablet) that is connected to your Pocket account. To log in to Pocket, please visit our website or download any of our mobile apps, then log in with your Pocket username and password.

Because your List is stored in the cloud, you do not need to create special backups of your saved Pocket items. However, If you wish to download your list for other uses you can use our export tool which creates a downloadable HTML file with your List and Archive.

To access our export tool, click here:

http://getpocket.com/export

Then click on the Export HTML file link to download your Pocket data.

Tags: pocket, bookmarks, motd

Parsing Bitwarden CLI

If you use the excellent Bitwarden app for you password storage you may not be aware that they also have a command line version on Linux. It outputs data using the JSON format. You can install the jq JSON parser and pipe the output of the CLI’s query to it in order to extract the username and password for a specific site in your search:

$ bw list items --search accounts.google.com | jq '.[] | .login.uris[].uri,.login.username,.login.password'
"https://accounts.google.com"
"john.doe@gmail.com"
"** password1 **"
"https://accounts.google.com"
"jdoe@gmail.com"
"** password2 **"

Tags: cli, bitwarden, json, password-managers, motd

Export VirtualBox VDI using CLI

Sometimes you may want to move a virtual machine in VirtualBox from one server to another. Once way of doing that is to export it from the command line.

1. Locate the virtual machine that you want to export (I’ll use the name UbuntuServer for the one to be exported and name the new one UbuntuServerNew), and then
2. Run the export command as follows:

$ vboxmanage export UbuntuServer -o UbuntuServerNew.ova

Tags: cli, virtualization, virtualbox, motd

Install mimic Text-To-Speech on Slackware 15

Per the manpage: Mimic is a command line tool for synthesizing speech from text. If outfile.wav is omitted mimic will output the utterance using the computer sound card.

Mimic is based on flite and strives to extend functionality and add more languages while keeping the application fast and light.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

$ git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic1.git
$ cd mimic1/
$ ./dependencies.sh --prefix="/usr/local"
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix="/usr/local"
$ make
$ make check
$ su -c "make install"

You can list the default voices that are installed with mimic by passing it the -lv command line parameter.

$ mimic -lv
Voices available: ap slt slt_hts kal awb kal16 rms awb_time

Which tells you that there are 8 voices available.

You should now be able to do some testing at the command line:

$ mimic -t "Hello world"
$ mimic -t "Hello world"
$ mimic -t 'Hello, this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system'
$ mimic -t 'Hello, this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system' -voice slt

See the manpage for more info and options.

Tags: text-to-speech, mimic, slackware, motd

Install svox Package on Slackware 15.0 for Better Text-to-Speech

I was having issues finding a good voice synthesis for Foliate to read my books to me. I have always had issues with the sound of the espeak and espeak-ng voices. So I was searching for an alternative. I couldn’t find a way to build festival on Slackware (yet) but while searching around found a package called svox that had a SlackBuild so I thought I’d give it a try.

1. Install the svox SlackBuild package using whatever tools you would normally use. I happen to use sbotools which make use of the packages maintained by Ponce.
2. You will end up with a binary called pico2audio which is the program you need to perform all of your text-to-speech needs. See pico2audio --help for details (there aren’t really many).

It was simpler than I thought. Just open Foliate, Settings (the hamburger menu), Preferences and then enter pico2audio in the Text-to-Speech Command box and you’re done.

Tags: svox, text-to-speech, audio, pico2audio, motd

Bulk Change of File Extensions in Directory

If you have a directory of files where you want to change all of the file extensions you may find this code snippet useful to rename them:

for i in *.tmp
do
mv ${i} ${i%.*}.txt
done

Tags: cli, bash, rename, motd

Rename Files Downloaded Using youtube-dl

If you have used youtube-dl to download content from YouTube then you know that the file names can get to be rather long. In addition to the video’s title there is a dash followed by what appears to be a random sequence of characters just before the file extension. If you find this to be annoying then here is a code snippet that you can use to remove it.

This will remove the last field separated by a ‘-’ and replace it with the file extension of your choice, .mp4 is used in this example:

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.mp4
do
# Remove everything from the last hyphen to the end
file="${i%-*}"
# Rename the file and remove the space between 'file'
# and the file extension on the fly
mv "${i}" "${file%%*( )}.mp4"
done

Tags: cli, youtube, renaming, motd

Unable to Burn .ISO File to DVD With K3B

If you’re having a problem as a ‘regular’ Slackware user burning an ISO file to a blank DVD, this may resolve your issue:

# chown root:cdrom /usr/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/cdrdao
# chmod 4750 /usr/bin/cdrecord /usr/bin/cdrdao

Tags: dvd, k3b, slackware, kde, motd

LXC in Slackware

Following directions from: lxc for Slackware 14.2. I haven’t tested on Slackware 15 yet. You will have to set this up while running as root.

1. Create the file '/etc/default/lxc-net' and add the line USE_LXC_BRIDGE="true" to it.

2. Create the directory '/var/lib/misc'

3. Start the service: # /usr/libexec/lxc/lxc-net start

4. Create a config file:

# cat >slac-xlc.con <<“EOF”
lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = lxcbr0
EOF

5. Create the container:

# arch=x86_64 release=14.2 MIRROR=http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/slackware lxc-create -n Slackware64-14.2 -t slackware -f slack-xlc.conf

6. Start the container for the first time:

# lxc-start -n Slackware64-14.2

7. Login to the container:

# lxc-console -n Slackware64-14.2

or

# lxc-attach -n Slackware64-14.2

The difference between these two methods is that using the first you will require a username and password (root and root, in this case) and with the latter you won’t.

8. The first thing you will need to do is set up the container to connect to the network. Edit '/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf' and update the USE_DHCP entry for 'eth0' to USE_DHCP[0]="yes".

9. Restart the container and verify connectivity.

# lxc-stop -n Slackware64-14.2 && lxc-start -n Slackware64-14.2

10. Login to the container and use ‘ping’ to verify connectivity.

Tags: slackware, lxc, containers, motd

Sending Email from the Command Line with mutt

If you prefer using mutt as your command line email tool, then here are a couple of examples of using mutt to send emails which can be automated quite easily to use in scripts.

Sending a file attachment (-a) and an empty message body:

$ mutt -s "System Logs" -a /var/log/somelog.log -- username@example.com < /dev/null

Sending a message body using redirection:

$ mutt -s "Email Subject" username@example.com < email.html

Sending a file attachment along with a message body:

$ echo $message | mutt -s "Email Subject" -a attachment.txt -- username@example.com

Tags: cli, mutt, mail, motd

Sending Email from the Command Line with cURL

Let’s assume that you had a RFC 5822 formatted file named mail.txt as follows:

From: Some Sender <some.sender@gmail.com>
To: Some Recipient <some.recipient@example.com>
Subject: Saying Hello
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2023 04:15:06 -0100
Message-ID: <1234@local.machine.example>

This is a message just to say hello.
So, "Hello".

You can forward this to a email recipient using Google’s SMTP with the following curl command provided you have a Google app password:

$ curl --url 'smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465' --ssl-reqd \
 --mail-from 'some.sender@gmail.com' \ 
 --mail-rcpt 'some.recipient@example.com' \
 --upload-file mail.txt \
 --user 'some.sender@gmail.com:your-gmail-app-password'

Output should be something like this:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100    12    0     0  100    12      0     10  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:--    10
$

Tags: cli, curl, mail, motd

Transfering Files Using netcat

You can use netcat to transfer a file from one machine to another machine. On the receiving machine enter the following command:

$ netcat -l 12345 > file.txt or

$ netcat -l -p 12345 > file.pdf

Then, on the sending machine use this command:

$ netcat $MY_IP_ADDRESS 12345 < file.txt

Tags: cli, netcat, nc, motd

Install Openbox on Slackware

I have been running blackbox on my Slackware desktop and decided that I’d try a different ‘flavor’ called openbox which are in the SBo repositories. I started by executing sbopkg at the root prompt and found these packages available:

There is the primary openbox package and there are 4 optional packages listed:

• openbox
• libfm-extra
• lxmenu-data
• menu-cache
• openbox-menu

And several theme packages:

• arc-openbox
• openbox-simple-theme

The openbox-menu and openbox-simple-theme downloads failed but I was able to get away with using obconf and obmenu tools.

Configuration files are stored in /etc/xdg/openbox and you should copy the menu.xml file to ~/.config/openbox/ so that you can customize your menu.

Tags: slackware, openbox, motd

How to Use DNF History

If you are using a Red Hat/Fedora-based distro, here are some tips on how to use the dnf tool to query your install history:

Retrieve a list of manually installed packages:

$ dnf history userinstalled

Retrieve a list of all transactions:

$ dnf history list all

List the changes in a particular transaction:

$ history list <num>

Undo/rollback a transaction:

$ dnf history undo <num>

Tags: cli, packaging, dnf, motd

Windows Terminal Keyboard Shortcuts

I have to use Windows where I work but I use the terminal as often as possible. Microsoft’s Windows Terminal application makes that experience tolerable. You can even think that you’re using tmux at times…well, not really, but you get the idea.

Here are some of the keyboard shortcuts that I use:

Split current terminal window

Alt Shift - split pane horizontal

Alt Shift - split pane vertical

Jump to other console

Alt <arrow key>

Resize current terminal window

Alt Shift <arrow key>

Close terminal window

Ctrl Shift W

Others that I don’t use as much

Ctrl + Shift + Number: Open new profiles/tabs. Use this shortcut to open a new profile or tab in Windows Terminal. Each number represents a specific profile in the Terminal. Profiles are numbered in the top-down form in the profile selection dropdown menu on the title bar. For example, if the PowerShell profile is in the second position, you should press the “Ctrl + Shift + 2” to open it.

Ctrl + Alt + Number: Switch to a specific tab. Use this shortcut to switch between tabs. Tabs are numbered from left to right and start with “1.” For example, if you want to switch to the third tab, press “Ctrl + Alt + 3.”

Ctrl + Shift + Space: Opens profile selection dropdown menu. You can then use the up/down arrow keys to select and open the profile.

Ctrl + Shift + T: Opens a new tab with the default profile.

Ctrl + Shift + N: Opens a new Windows Terminal instance.

Ctrl + Shift + D: This shortcut will duplicate or open another instance of the current tab. However, it will not copy the content of the original tab.

Ctrl + C: Copy selected text. Select the text in the Terminal and press the shortcut to copy it to the clipboard. Once copied, you can paste it anywhere you want.

Ctrl + V: Paste clipboard content. Pressing this shortcut will paste the clipboard contents into the Terminal. Keep in mind that only compatible content, like text, will be pasted. If you try to paste incompatible content, like an image, the result will not be as expected or intended.

Ctrl + Shift + W: Close the current tab (not the entire application).

Alt + F4: Close the Windows Terminal window. If there are multiple tabs, you might see a warning prompt. In that case, click “Close all” to continue.

Ctrl + Shift + F: Opens the “Find” function. It can be used to find instances of a text or sentence in a terminal tab. This functionality is similar to what you find in a browser or other applications like Notepad, Word, etc.

Ctrl + Numpad Add/Minus: Increase or decrease the text size in the Windows Terminal tab.

Ctrl + 0: Reset the font or text size its default (100%).

Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down arrow: Scroll up or down in the Windows Terminal.

Ctrl + Shift + PageUp/PageDown: Move to top or bottom in the Windows Terminal.

Alt + Shift + Minus/Plus: Split current pane horizontally or vertically.

Ctrl + Shift + P: Toggle command palette. It can be used to select and execute a command or action from the available list.

Ctrl + Shift + ,: This shortcut opens the Settings tab in the Windows Terminal.

F11: Toggle fullscreen.

Tags: cli, windows, terminal, shortcuts, motd

Install Kooha on Ubuntu 21.04

Kooha is a GTK-based screen recorder for Linux for recording screens and audio from your desktop or microphone. It is very simple to use

Install flathub from the Ubuntu software repository:

$ sudo apt install flatpak from the repository:

Install Koohu from the command line:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install flathub io.github.seadve.Kooha

You should now see an icon for Kooha in you GNOME applications window.

Tags: flatpak, kooha, av, recording, motd

Update Slackware Broadcom Driver

It doesn’t happen often, but whenever there’s a new kernel package for Slackware on my laptop I need to update the Broadcom driver. To do this:

1. Update your OS, as usual.
2. Reboot
3. Plug in the ethernet cable, if necessary
4. Login as root
5. Perform sbopkg -i broadcom-sta
6. Done

You can read more about it on the Slackware wiki here

Tags: slackware, broadcom, motd

Installing Foliate Ebook Reader on Slackware 15

I don't know about you, but I love reading ebooks and I've used Foliate before on other distributions but can't find it for my OS of choice, Slackware. So, here's how to install it from source:

1. Download the foliate software tarball from here
2. Install appstream-glib (which provides dependency appstream-util) using sboinstall
3. Install webkit2gtk (which provides dependency WebKit2) using sboinstall
4. Build foliate. Instructions are on the GitHub page or just extract the tarball, cd into the directory and then execute the following on the command line:

$ tar zxvf foliate-2.6.4.tar.gz
$ cd foliate-2.6.4
$ meson build --prefix=/usr
$ ninja -c build
$ ninja -C build
$ su -c "ninja -C build install"

Tags: cli, ebooks, slackware, motd

Archive Only Files In a Directory

If you want to create a tar archive of only the files of a directory and exclude any subdirectories you can use the ls -la command and pipe the output to awk. However you need to remove the first 8 fields from the output and leave all of the remaining parts of the line in case there are spaces in the filename. One quick and dirty way of doing that is to set each of the 8 fields to a blank and then use sed to trim the leading spaces. You can optionally add quotation marks around the filename in your output too.

$ ls -al | awk '$0!~/^d/ {$1=$2=$3=$4=$5=$6=$7=$8=""; printf("%s\"\n", $0)}' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*/"/' | xargs tar cvf archive-name.tar

Tags: cli, tar, awk, xargs, sed, motd

Edit a Remote File Using Vim

To edit a file remotely using the vim editor, just do the following in a terminal window:

$ scp://username@IP-address//path/to/file.txt

The user must have access to the file being edited.

Tags: cli, vim, scp, motd

Echo File Until a Blank Line Is Reached

You can use the awk program to search and print lines in a file. If you wanted to print a file until the first blank line is reached you can use the following command to do that:

awk '$0 ~ /^$/ {exit;} {print $0;}' somefile.txt

Tags: awk, cli, motd

Calibre Server Installation on a Raspberry Pi

These instructions are for installing the Calibre book management software on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu 20.04 but should work with Raspian or other Debian-derived operating systems. This is just a briefer version of the same instructions that are posted here.

Install the calibre-bin package and its dependencies:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y
$ sudo apt install calibre-bin

Create a user to run this program.

$ sudo adduser calibre

Login as the 'calibre' user and create some directories:

$ mkdir calibre-library
$ mkdir ~/books-to-add

Enable user authentication:

calibre-server --manage-users

Create a service for the Calibre server

[Unit]
Description=calibre content server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=calibre
Group=calibre
ExecStart=/usr/bin/calibre-server \
--port=8081 --enable-local-write --enable-auth \
/home/calibre/calibre-library

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable the service:

$ sudo systemctl enable calibre-server
$ sudo systemctl start calibre-server

Create a cron job to run periodically add books from the books-to-add directory:

/5 * * * * calibredb add /home/calibre/books-to-add/ -r --with-library http://localhost:8081#calibre-library --username calibre --password *

Supplemental instructions are here

Tags: calibre, raspberry-pi, motd

Gitea Server Installation on a Raspberry Pi

Create a 'git' user:

$ sudo adduser git

Login as the 'git' user and download the gitea binary from the gitea website (choose the latest version):

wget -O gitea https://dl.gitea.io/gitea/1.14.5/gitea-1.14.5-linux-amd64
chmod +x gitea

Create a service. We're keeping it simple here so we don't need a lot of the database-specific stuff:

[Unit]
Description=Gitea (Git with a cup of tea)
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
# Modify these two values and uncomment them if you have
# repos with lots of files and get an HTTP error 500 because
# of that
#LimitMEMLOCK=infinity
#LimitNOFILE=65535
RestartSec=2s
Type=simple
User=git
Group=git
WorkingDirectory=/home/git/
# If using Unix socket: tells systemd to create the /run/gitea folder, which will contain the gitea.sock file
# (manually creating /run/gitea doesn't work, because it would not persist across reboots)
#RuntimeDirectory=gitea
ExecStart=/home/git/gitea web --config /home/git/custom/conf/app.ini
Restart=always
Environment=USER=git HOME=/home/git GITEAWORKDIR=/home/git

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start Gitea at boot:

sudo systemctl enable gitea
sudo systemctl start gitea

Tags: git, gitea, raspberry-pi, motd

Bash Environment Variables

Here are some bash environment variables that are useful to know when you're using the command prompt:

$0 - name of shell or shell script
$1, $2, $3, ... - positional parameters to script
$# - count of positional parameters
$? - exit status of most recent foreground task
$- - current options that are set for the shell
$$ - PID of the current shell (not subshell)
$! - the PID of the most recent background command
$DESKTOP_SESSION - path to the current display manager
$EDITOR - preferred text editor
$LANG - current language
$PATH - directory list to search for executables (programs)
$PWD - current working directory
$SHELL - current shell
$USER - current username
$HOME - current user's home directory
$HOSTNAME - current name of the host
$TERM - current terminal

Tags: cli, bash, motd

Bash CLI Keyboard Shortcuts

Here are some quick keyboard shortcuts you can use at the command prompt:

ctrl-l -- clear screen
ctrl-r -- does a search in the previously given commands so that you don't have to repeat long command.
ctrl-u -- clears the typing before the hotkey.
ctrl-a -- takes you to the begining of the command you are currently typing.
ctrl-e -- takes you to the end of the command you are currently typing in.
esc-b -- takes you back by one word while typing a command.
ctrl-c -- kills the current command or process.
ctrl-d -- kills the shell.
ctrl-h -- deletes one letter at a time from the command you are typing in.
ctrl-z -- puts the currently running process in background, the process can be brought back to run state by using fg command.
esc-p -- like ctrl-r lets you search through the previously given commands.
esc-. -- gives the last command you typed.

Tags: cli, motd

How To Find All of the Shell Scripts In a Directory

This is a quick and dirty way which will list all of the files that are shell scripts:

for i in *
do
type=$(file ${i}|awk -F, '{print $2}')
if [[ "${type}" = " ASCII text executable" ]]; then
echo "${i} is a shell script"
fi
done

Tags: cli, motd, awk

Diff 2 Folders Over SSH

If you need to do a 'diff' on 2 folders and one of them is remote then you can accomplish that as follows:

$ diff <(ssh username@192.168.1.60 ls -R /home/username/dir1) <(ls -R /home/username/dir2)

Tags: ssh, diff, motd

How to Enable the Administrator Account in Windows

To activate the Administrator account on Windows, open the Command Prompt as Administrator from the Start Menu, or you can right-click on the "Start" menu and select the "Powershell" menu item, then enter:

net user administrator /active: yes

into the window. You should disable the account again when you're done.

Tags: windows, sysadmin, motd

Convert HTML Files to EPUB Using Pandoc

If you want to convert one or more HTML files to EPUB quickly using the command line you can try pandoc.

pandoc -f html -t epub3 -o output.epub input.html

You can add metadata for epub:

pandoc -f html -t epub3 --epub-metadata=metadata.xml -o output.epub input.html

You can find other resources here:

How to convert various eBook formats for Amazon Kindle on Linux

Tags: epub, pandoc, motd

Mastodon Automated Postings using the API

You can post to Mastodon using their API using cURL.

Create or Find Your Access Token

Once you have a Mastodon account, you need your account's access token. The steps you need to get that:

1. Sign into your Mastodon account
2. Click on In the "Preferences" link.
3. On the bottom left corner of that page, click the "Development" link.
4. On the "Your Applications" page, click the blue NEW APPLICATION button.
5. Give your application a name, and decide what kind of access you want to have when you connect to your account via the Mastodon API (iread, write, and follow are the defaults). You can always change this later.
6. At the bottom of the page, click the blue SUBMIT button.
7. You will be directed back to the Your applications page, but now you should see your application name. Click that.
8. In your application's page, there are three tokens. For this tutorial, you need the Your access token one. Note: if your access token is ever compromised, you can click regenerate, and your old access token will stop working, and you'll be shown a new one.

Post a Status Update using cURL

$ curl https://mastodon.sdf.org/api/v1/statuses -H 'Authorization: Bearer put-your-api-token-here' -F 'status=Hello, World'

Tags: curl, mastodon, api, motd

Creating Passwordless SSH Keys

Create the key. Note those are two single quotes after the -N (for a blank passwd)
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -N ''

Copy it to the target server
$ cat .ssh/idrsa.pub | ssh username@192.168.1.123 'cat >> .ssh/authorizedkeys'

Test it
$ ssh username@192.168.1.123

Tags: ssh, motd

SSH Directory Permissions Settings

It is important to set the directory and file permissions for your ~/.ssh correctly.

Typically you want the permissions to be:

• .ssh directory: 700 (drwx------)
• public key (.pub file): 644 (-rw-r--r--)
• private key (id_rsa): 600 (-rw-------)
• lastly your home directory should not be writeable by the group or others (at most 755 (drwxr-xr-x)).

For example, to set this permissions do:
$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/*
$ chmod 644 ~/.ssh/*.pub
$ ls -ltr ~/.ssh/

Tags: ssh, motd

How To Use Github Tokens on the Command Line

GitHub’s access policy requires you to use tokens instead of username/password to update your repositories.

To adapt your existing local / cloned repos to token based auth:
$ git remote remove origin
$ git remote add origin https://[TOKEN]@github.com/[USER]/[REPO]
$ git push

Clone repos using token based authentication (non public repos)
$ git clone https://[username]:[token]@github.com/[accountname]/[reponame]

Tags: github, tokens, motd, cli

Sending Email from the Command Line

mutt Examples

Sending just a file attachment (-a) and an empty message body:

$ mutt -s "System logs" -a /opt/backup.sql -- user@example.com < /dev/null

Sending a message body using redirection:

$ mutt -s "Email subject" test@example.com < email.html

Sending a file attachment along with a message body:

$ echo $message | mutt -s "Subject" -a attachment.txt -- me@myemail.com

mailx Example:

$ echo "message body" | mail -s "subject" test@example.com

Tags: mail, mutt, motd

How to convert VirtualBox VDI to KVM qcow2

It is easy to convert a VirtualBox VDI image to a KVM qcow2 file. You have to use the RAW file format as an intermediate.

Make sure the VirtualBox machine is shutdown.

1. Convert the VDI to a raw disk image.
   Note: VDIs are compressed and raw images are not, so you will need to leave enough disk space for entire uncompressed disk.
   
   $ VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW vm.vdi vm.img
   
   
2. Then on your KVM host:
   $ qemu-img convert -f raw vm.img -O qcow2 vm.qcow2
   

Tags: virtualization, virtualbox, kvm, qcow2, motd

How To Count All The Files Extension Recursively In Linux

To count all the files by file extension recursively on the command line

$ find . -type f | sed -n 's/..*.//p' | sort | uniq -c
40 3g2
5 AVI
13 DS_Store
28 JPG
30 MOV
133 MP4
64 THM
1 docx
18 jpg
1 json
4 m3u
89 m4a
2 m4r
156 m4v
41 mkv
112 mov
38 mp3
587 mp4
1 nfo
2 osp
30 png
1 sh
4 srt
6 svg
10 torrent
6 txt
5 webm
10 zip

Tags: cli, motd, find, sed, sort, uniq

Untar a Tarball to a Remote Directory

Sometimes you may need to copy an entire directory structure to another system using the command line. Here is a quick way to do it using the tar command:

cat myfile.tgz | ssh user@host "tar xzf - -C /some/dir"

Tags: cli, motd, tar

Gnome3 Menu Icons

To add your own menu icons to a GNOME3 environment check out this link: Desktop files: putting your application in the desktop menus

Tags: linux, motd

Getting Rid of ^M Line Endings in a Text File

If you have a text file that has funny looking ^M characters at the end of each line, in most cases, you have to get rid of them before they can be used. This is especially the case when you've copied or transferred a file from a Windows-based system to a *nix-based one. If these files are shell scripts meant to run on the *nix-based system they more often than not won't work. There are various solutions to this problem.

First, let's create two text files: one with ^M line endings and one without:

$ for line in 1 2 3 4 5; do echo "This is line ${line}^M" >>file1.txt; done
$ for line in 1 2 3 4 5; do echo "This is line ${line}" >>file2.txt; done

Now let's see what's different between these two text files:

$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r--. 1 gszumo gszumo 80 Oct 29 17:43 file1.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 gszumo gszumo 75 Oct 29 17:44 file2.txt

$ file file1.txt
file1.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

$ file file2.txt
file2.txt: ASCII text

$ diff file1.txt file2.txt
1,5c1,5
< This is line 1
< This is line 2
< This is line 3
< This is line 4
< This is line 5
---
> This is line 1
> This is line 2
> This is line 3
> This is line 4
> This is line 5
$

What does this tell us?

• The ls command tells us the file sizes are different even though the visible text is the same.
• The file command tells us that both files are ASCII text but file1.txt has CRLF line terminators, and
• The diff command tells us that each line is indeed showing us that it's different.

So, how do we fix this?

My favorite solution is to use vi or vim interactively. There are 2 easy ways to get rid of the ^M from a single file using vim:

1. Enter the command:
   :%s/^M//g
   on the vim command line then save the file, or
2. Enter the command:
   :fileformat=unix
   on the vim command line and save the file.

However, if you have a whole directory or directory tree full of these kinds of files using vim on each one individually will become quite tedious. For this you need the scripting capability of the command line!

The 'tr' command is one quick way of getting rid of them using the Linux or macOS command line:

cat somefile | tr -d '^M' >outputfile

We can use this as a template in order to determine whether or not the file needs to be updated:

for i in *
do
string=$(file ${i})
test "${string#*'CRLF'}" != "$string" && echo "CRLF found in ${i}"
done

If the 'echo' part of this snippet only gets called when the first part of the test is true, so then we know that the file has '^M' line endings. We have to turn the second part of the test into a script that will massage the file to remove the line endings. Here's a bash snippet that will put the two together and do the job:

for i in *
do
string=$(file ${i})
if [ "${string#*'CRLF'}" != "$string" ];then
cp ${i} ${i}.bak
cat ${i}.bak|tr -d '^M' >${i}
rm ${i}.bak
fi
done

This is a bare-bones piece of code which doesn't do any error checking, which should be added in the event that the user running this script doesn't have the necessary permissions to copy, write or remove files that match the test.

Remember, in order to create a '^M' character in the terminal hold down the CTRL key while typing vm.

You can also use 'ex' to replace a string in a file using:

ex -s -c '%s/old-str/new-str/g|x' filename.txt

Alternately, we can use sed to do the same thing. At the command line you can replace any string in a file dynamically by entering:

sed -i 's/old-str/new-str/' filename.txt

So to remove the ^M charaters just do:

sed -i 's/^M//' filename.txt

to remove the ^M characters. You can use the same for/do/done loop structure as mentioned above to iterate over multiple files:

for i in *.txt
do
sed -i 's/^M//' ${i}
done

'Nuff said.

Tags: cli, motd

Removing ^M Characters From Multiple Files

In my day job I find that I frequently need to remove those pesky '^M' line endings from text files that are transferred from one system to the other. Most of the time it is just one file that needs to be fixed so going into vi and typing

:%s/^M//g

solves the problem, but on occasion I might be confronted with performing this process on multiple files and sometimes recursively through many subdirectories. When that happens it becomes necessary to bring out the "big guns" and do:

$ for file in $(find /path/to/dir -type f); do
tr -d '\r' <$file >temp.$$ && mv temp.$$ $file
done
$

(BTW, to generate a ^M character using the PuTTY emulator is easy. Just press CTRL-^ followed by CTRL-M)

Of course, in Linux, UNIX and AIX shells there are many ways to skin a cat and this is just one of many possible solutions. This solution was found on a Daily Vim Blogspot site which has more very interesting tips & tutorials.

Tags: cli, motd

Get the Hash of a File on Different Operating Systems

Sometimes you just need to hash something. Here are some command lines to do just that.

Windows PowerShell:

Get-FileHash C:\path\to\file.iso -Algorithm [MD5|SHA1|SHA256|SHA384|SHA512|MACTripleDES|RIPEMD160]

(SHA256 is the default if the parameter is omitted)

Linux:

md5sum /path/to/file
sha1sum /path/to/file
sha256sum /path/to/file

macOS:

MD5: md5 /path/to/file
SHA1: shasum /path/to/file or shasum -a 1 /path/to/file
SHA-256: shasum -a 256 /path/to/file

Tags: cli, motd

Copy Entire Directory Structure Using Tar

Sometimes you need to copy an entire directory structure to another location on the command line. Here is a quick way to do it using the tar command:

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

Tags: cli, motd

Fixing Screen Resolution on Second Monitor in Linux

I recently installed a 2nd hard drive in my Macbook Pro dedicated to Linux. When I hooked up a secondary monitor to it I found that I could not get a reasonable resolution. After some research I found that I can add a new mode to the "Display" choices by entering the following in a terminal console:

xrandr # to find the device name
cvt 1920 1080 # to generate the mode for the xrandr program.
xrandr --newmode "1920x108060.00" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync # to add the new mode to the monitor choices.
xrandr --addmode DP1 1920x108060.00 # to associate the new mode to the monitor.

Tags: linux, motd

Sort Directory by File Size

To sort files in a directory and to list them by the biggest file first:
$ du -a | sort -n -r | more
Alternatively you can use:
$ du -s * | sort -n -r | more

Tags: cli, motd

Talkin' Trash

Having trouble getting the "Empty Trash" working in Thunar? Remove "~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/thunar*".

Tags: linux, motd

Uptime Statistics for Windows

To find the uptime for a Windows machine do

C:> net statistics server

Tags: windows, motd

Alternative to Using cp

To backup files from a source directory to a backup directory: $ mkdir /path/to/backup/directory $ cd $HOME/source/directory $ tar cf - . | (cd /path/to/backup/directory && tar xBvf -) Define the following alias:

tar cvf - . | ( cd \!* ; tar xvf - )

or as an alias:

alias cpbytar='tar cvf - . | ( cd \!* ; tar xvf - )' (The alias definition above is for Bash)

To do a recursive copy of a directory to another location, preserving the PERMISSIONS and OWNERSHIP of the files. "cd" to the source location and invoke the following alias:

cpbytar

Tags: cli, motd

git Tips

A useful tip to beautify your output is to use: $ git log --graph --decorate --oneline --abbrev-commit --all --date=local when looking at your log entries. Or you can add [alias] lola = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all --date=local to your ~/.gitconfig file to use $ git lola as an alias.

Tags: git, motd