I have several installation of Thunderbird under Linux to check/send emails using IMAP email servers. I use filters extensively to manage my emails. How to export and import message filters of Thunderbird so that I can synchronize the rules on several installations? About message filters in Thunderbird (More at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_(Thunderbird)): Filters are account specific, there…
I have multiple video files, say video1.avi, video2.avi and video3.avi. How to concatenate these multiple video file to a single file together on Linux? You can use mencoder to concatenate multiple video files to one file. For installing mencoder on Fedora, please check: http://www.systutorials.com/1493/mplayer-on-fedora/ For the question, the command is: mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy…
How to find broken symbolic links in a directory which have many symbolic links? Use this command to find broken soft links: find -xtype l /path/to/dir/to/find/in/ You can also specify the action by -exec. For example, delete the soft links that are broken in the current directory: find -xtype l -exec rm -f {} ;…
How to change my password on a Linux box? The original password is generated by the administrator for me. User the passwd command. The easiest way: Log in the Linux box with your account Run passwd and it will ask your old and new passwords.
Kindle is good for reading. However, the A4-size technical/academic paper is pain to read on Kindle 5—the fonts are too small. The “email to Kindl” converting tool provided by Amazon usually loses the formats in the technical paper. How to convert A4 paper format to read on Kindle 5? I use k2pdfopt tool (hey, source…
How to convert a MS Word document file such as .docx and .doc to pdf on Linux using command line tools? Use LibreOffice: libreoffice –headless –convert-to pdf –outdir /path/to/out/dir/ /path/to/doc/docx/file While this LibreOffice answer works, the –headless option still needs as display, even though it does not use it. In otherwords, this option won’t work…
utop is an improved toplevel for OCaml supporting line edition, history, real-time and context sensitive completion, colors and etc. utop is convenient to use. However, the key bindings are a little bit different from the ones with GNU readline. What are all the key bindings? The #utop_bindings command will print all the key bindings. Here…
How to find the disk space left for a file on Linux? For example, a program may append data to a file: /mnt/logs/app-log.log How to find which partition the app-log.log is on and how much disk space left on that partition? Use this command: $ df -B1 /mnt/logs/app-log.log | tail -1 | cut -d’ ‘…
How to get the output of a system command in C? The system function is handy. But how to get the output? popen is a useful function for this purpose: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/3p-popen/ You can use normal file operation functions like fgets to read file content from the file opened by popen.
How to convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to a date in Linux? For example, Convert the time stamp 1349361711.169942 to Thu Oct 4 22:41:51 HKT 2012 You can use the date command on Linux to convert the time formats. For converting the time stamp 1349361711.169942 to the normal data format: $ date -d…
How to set an environment variable in bash? The syntax in bash for setting an environment variable is as follows. export VARIABLE=value Note that there is no space among the variable, the equals sign (“=”) and the value. If the value has spaces, the value should be put in quotes. To check it: echo $VARIABLE…
For example, try to less the error messages generated by the compiler with make | less Use this command: make 2>&1 | less or, if you want stderr only: make 2>&1 >/dev/null | less
How to list the functions in a .a library on Linux? You can use the nm command: The nm utility shall display symbolic information appearing in the object file, executable file, or object-file library named by file. If no symbolic information is available for a valid input file, the nm utility shall report that fact,…
A common error for configuring cron is to use environmental variables for an account in the cron command. However, cron will run the commands without these variables defined. In the crontab -e, adding . $HOME/.profile before the commands play the trick. For example: 0 */8 * * * . $HOME/.profile; ~/bin/my-command Cron is started by…
How to find out the number of CPU cores on a Linux host. Use the command nproc. $ nproc nproc – print the number of processing units available: man page of nproc.
For example, I want to spawn many ssh background processes in one bash script: for i in `cat ./all-hosts` do ssh $i “ifconfig | grep Link” done Simply adding a & to the ssh commands does not work. Here is the script that works: for i in `cat ./all-hosts` do ssh $i “ifconfig | grep…
How to force Linux to reboot when the reboot command does not work. Enable the use of the magic SysRq option: # echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq Reboot the machine: # echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger Even if you could not log on the system but sshd is working, you can force the Linux to reboot by:…
This tutorial introduces how to exclude certain repositories in yum. Excluding certain repositories is needed usually. One example may be when you have several repositories that have the same package and you only want the one from a certain repository. For my situation, I choose to exclude the google-chrome and other repositories from Google when…
Plain text file pipelined to Linux mailx turns to “Content-Type: application/octet-stream” which is recognized as an attachment by some email client. The command is like this: $ cat log.txt | mail -s “Updated log file” -r “from@example.com” “to@example.com” I expect it to be: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit But it turns out to be: Content-Type:…
I know the routing tables on Linux is in memory after being set. However, where are the routing table entries stored on disk? I mean where are the routing table is persistently stored so that the routing table can be reloaded like the iptables (under /etc/sysconfig/iptables on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linuxes). If the system uses the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network…