Many PDF-to-text conversions strip away formatting and spatial relationships, making tables unreadable and multi-column layouts collapse into linear text. If you need to preserve the relative positions of text elements—especially tables, columns, and indentation—you have several solid options. pdftotext with layout preservation The simplest approach is pdftotext, which comes with most distributions as part of…
The free command—along with ps, top, kill, pgrep, and dozens of other system utilities—is maintained as part of the procps-ng project. Source repository The source code is hosted at: https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps You can clone it with: git clone https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git cd procps Most distributions package procps-ng, so you likely already have it installed. You can verify the…
Automating keyboard input on Linux is useful for testing, accessibility workflows, and automation scripts. If you need to simulate pressing multiple keys simultaneously and holding them, xdotool is the standard tool for this job. Basic approach with xdotool The keydown and keyup commands let you press and release individual keys without triggering the other. To…
When you’re processing text with varying amounts of whitespace between fields, the standard cut command falls short. Given input like this: a b c d You need a way to reliably extract fields regardless of how many spaces separate them. Here are the practical approaches. Using tr with cut The tr command can normalize whitespace…
When uploading files to HDFS using hdfs dfs -put, the replication factor defaults to the cluster-wide setting in hdfs-site.xml (typically 3). For temporary files, logs, or staging data, you often want a lower replication factor to reduce write latency and disk usage. Override Replication Factor at Upload Time Use the -D flag to pass HDFS…
When you need to traverse a directory tree in Python, you have several options. The choice depends on whether you want recursive traversal, how you want to handle the results, and your Python version. Using os.walk() The os.walk() function is the classic approach for recursively iterating through directories. It yields tuples of (dirpath, dirnames, filenames)…
When your Node.js application encounters a fatal error or needs to terminate, you need a reliable way to shut it down. Understanding how to exit gracefully—or forcefully when necessary—is essential for production applications. Using process.exit() The most direct method is process.exit(), which immediately terminates the Node.js process: process.exit(); This is a global method that doesn’t…
When you have SSH key-based authentication set up, the client will prefer it by default. This can make it difficult to test whether password authentication is working—especially after changing a password or troubleshooting login issues. Force password-only authentication Use the -o PreferredAuthentications=password flag: ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password username@host This tells SSH to use password authentication exclusively,…
The simplest way to detect whether your Linux system booted in UEFI or BIOS (Legacy) mode is to check for the existence of the EFI firmware directory. Check for EFI Directory The /sys/firmware/efi/ directory only exists when the system has booted in UEFI mode. If it’s absent, the system is running in BIOS/Legacy mode. […
While BIOS settings are the preferred way to disable USB 3.0, you can also force USB 2.0 mode on a running Linux system by manipulating the xHCI controller’s port routing register directly using setpci. How it works Intel xHCI controllers use the XUSB2PR (xHC USB 2.0 Port Routing Register) at offset 0xd0. Setting this register…
When running tree across multiple servers or sharing output with teammates, you’ll notice the formatting can vary significantly. Some systems display box-drawing characters while others use ASCII pipes and dashes, making diff comparisons and documentation inconsistent. Understanding the Charset Differences The tree command respects the system’s locale and character encoding settings. By default, it will…
The git status command shows repository state visually, but when you need to detect it programmatically in bash — say, to fail a CI pipeline or prevent deployments — you need a different approach. Quick Method: Check Unstaged Changes The most reliable way to detect uncommitted changes is with git diff: if [[ -n $(git…
[md] gThumb’s preferences aren’t always obvious when you’re looking through the traditional menu bar. The location depends on your desktop environment and gThumb version. ## GNOME Desktop On GNOME 3 and later, preferences are accessed through the application menu rather than the window menu: 1. Open gThumb 2. Click the application name (“gThumb”) in the…
When you need the commit hash of the latest commit, there are several ways to get it. The most direct approach is using git log with format options rather than parsing output with grep. Using git log with –format The cleanest method is to use git log with the –format option: git log -1 –format=”%H”…
When clients connect to your OpenWRT router via DHCP, they typically receive the router itself as the default gateway. Sometimes you need to advertise a different gateway — whether you’re running a proxy, load balancer, or multi-gateway setup on your network. This is done via DHCP option 3 (the router option in the DHCP specification)….
Chrome stores passwords encrypted in the system keyring (GNOME Keyring, KWallet, or Pass depending on your desktop environment). To export them in plain text, you’ll need to create a temporary Chrome profile with basic (unencrypted) password storage, sync your passwords from Google Cloud, then extract them from the SQLite database. Prerequisites Chrome or Chromium installed…
When troubleshooting email delivery or verifying mail server configuration, you need to look up the MX (Mail Exchange) records for a domain. On Linux, two tools handle this: host and dig. Both are reliable, though dig is generally preferred for its flexibility and cleaner output format. Using dig to query MX records The dig command…
When an NFS server goes down or becomes unreachable, client mounts can end up in a “Stale NFS file handle” state. Standard umount and umount -f commands fail, leaving you stuck with an unusable mount point and no clean way to recover without rebooting. The solution is to use umount -l (lazy unmount), which immediately…
By default, Apache2 ignores .htaccess files. The AllowOverride directive controls which directives in .htaccess Apache will process. To enable .htaccess, you need to configure Apache to allow overrides. Enable AllowOverride Edit your Apache configuration file. On Ubuntu/Debian, this is typically: sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf Find the <Directory /var/www/> block and change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All:…
When you need writes to one or more files to automatically go to another file, you have several options depending on your exact use case. The most common scenario is capturing output from commands, monitoring file changes, or duplicating writes across multiple destinations. Using tee for Command Output Duplication The tee command duplicates standard input…