Command line

How to avoid mounting failures blocking Linux booting?

Some entries in /etc/fstab may not not critical for booting Linux or even not available until Linux has booted. How to avoid the failures or unavailability of some mounting entries in /etc/fstab blocking the boot process of Linux? Please check the tutorial at Controlling Filesystem Mounting on Linux by Playing with /etc/fstab: Allow non-root users…

How to email admins automatically after a Linux server starts?

Managing a cluster of servers, I would like to notified when a server is started. How to make the Linux servers email me or other admins automatically after they are started? I did this by adding a crontab entry on each servers like @reboot date | mailx -S smtp=smtp://smtp.example.com -s “`hostname` started” -r zma@example.com zma@example.com…

How to merge multiple PDF files to a PDF on Linux?

convert seems works not very well when merging PDFs. The quality is low. Any other better methods to merge multiple PDF files to a single PDF on Linux? ghostscript works the best for me on merging PDFs: gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf merges in{1..3}.pdf to out.pdf.

How to set replication factors for HDFS directories?

Is it possible to set the replication factor for specific directory in HDFS to be one that is different from the default replication factor? This should set the existing files’ replication factors but also new files created in the specific directory. This can simplify the administration. We can set the replication factor of /tmp/ to…

How to get files without certain strings in their files names (reverse of *string*) on Linux?

To get files with certain string in their file names, it is quite straightforward: ls *string* However, how to do the reverse one: how to get files without certain strings in their files names on Linux? You can get a list of file names by a combination of find and xargs as follows: find ….

How to convert .pptx slides to .jpg or .png images on Linux in command line?

How to convert .pptx slides to .jpg or .png images on Linux in command line? This following method works best for me. First, convert .pptx file to .pdf using libreoffice: libreoffice –headless –convert-to pdf file.pptx –headless makes libreoffice run in batch mode and not start the GUI. The pdf file will be named file.pdf by…

How to convert between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese characters in text files on Linux?

How to convert between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese characters in text files on Linux from command line? You can use opencc to convert between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese: https://github.com/BYVoid/OpenCC For example, to transfer a file in simplified Chinese sc.txt to traditional Chinese: opencc -i sc.txt -o tc.txt -c zhs2zht.ini The authors also provide…

How to build mplayer with libdvdnav on Linux?

I find the mplayer from rpmfusion does not contain libdvdnav. How to build mplayer with libdvdnav on Linux? I did this on Fedora 21 to build mplayer with libdvdnav: Download mplayer src from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html and extract the tarball. Install needed packages (you will need more if you need more features): # yum install gcc make…

How to log connections hitting certain rules in iptables on Linux?

How to log connections hitting certain rules in iptables on Linux? Like the one that are dropped because of too frequently creating SSH connections. You can create a new chain named LOGNDROP that log the connections and drop them, then pass the connection to be redirected to the LOGNDROP chain. $tables -N LOGNDROP # Connections…

How to configure iptables on Linux Mint 17.1?

How to configure iptables and make the configuration persistent across system restarting on Linux Mint 17.1? You can use the ‘iptables-persistent’ tool. To install iptables-persistency pachage: sudo aptitude install iptables-persistent The you can manipulate the iptables by the ‘iptables’ command. To save the current iptables rules: sudo /etc/init.d/iptables-persistent store It will store the rules for…

Find Available Packages Versions using aptitude in Ubuntu

How to find the available packages’ versions with aptitude on Linux? With aptitude, you can use this command to show the available versions of a package: aptitude versions <package name> In the console GUI, aptitude also show the versions. You may also simulate installation of a package and see which version will be installed: aptitude…

How to exclude directories with certain names from rsync on Linux?

How to exclude directories with certain names like “cache” from rsync on Linux during backup? The “cache” directory may in many different paths, such as file1/cache/ or file2/cache/, and adding all “cache” directories to rsync command is not a doable way. You can use rsync with –exclude=cache/ like rsync -avxP –exclude=cache/ /path/to/src/directory/ /path/to/dst/dir/