In Bash, ~username gives the username user’s home. However, this does not work for situations where username is in a variable such as ~$user How to get the home directory from the user name in a variable in Bash? You can use this Bash script snippet: userhome=$(eval echo ~$user) Here, $user get evaluated to its…
Some time, Linux fails to unmount a filesystem reporting “device is busy”. I understand that this helps avoid data lost by disallowing unmouting a filesystem when it is being used. But for some situations, I am sure there is something wrong happened or I care not data lost, such as a NFS mounting while the…
Search and replace in the whole text in Vim can be done by :%s/from/to/gc. But how to search and replace in visual selection only? The %V atom in Vim restricts a pattern so that it matches only inside the visual selection. So, your command for searching and replacing only in the visual selection can be…
I am renewing my SSL key for my websites. The CA requests a CSR. I have my private key. How to generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) from a private SSL key? You can generate a CSR from your private key with openssl: openssl req -new -key ssl.key -out req.pem Here, ssl.key is your private…
How to get the top committers in git? Like in github: But plain text is fine showing number of commits and author names/emails sorted by the number of commits. You may use this command: git log | grep Author | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r Here, count the number of commits by…
Linux boots failed with “sulogin: can not open password database” while the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files look fine. How to fix this? The OS is Fedora 22. You may try this trick Step 1: boot Linux with rw init=/bin/bash following this tutorial. Step 2: after Linux booted, disable SELinux following this tutorial. Reboot. If it…
Vim can detects the file types from quite well. But under certain situations, such as creating a new file, Vim does not automatically set the file type. How to manually set it? In side Vim, to set a filetype, set value to the filetype variable. For example, to set the filetype to php: :set filetype=php
How to transfer text messages from android phone to computer? One solution is to use the SMS Backup & Restore app. The app will backup your messages to a microSD card and then you can copy it out to a PC by connecting your Android phone to your PC with the USB cable.
How to get the latest git commit SHA-1 id in a repository? And how to get the first 8 digits of the SHA-1? Instead of the method introduced here, you may use $ git rev-parse HEAD to get the commit SHA-1 hash ID. If you want to get the first 8 digits only, use $…
How to debug the media print view set by @media print {} in CSS of Web pages in Firefox? In firefox, after opening the Web page, First, hit “Shift + F2” to open the “Developer Toolbar” at the bottom. Second, in the “Developer Toobar”, input media emulate print and Firefox will show the print view…
I would like to play a video file in full screen and automatically make it keep playing during an exhibition. On Linux, how to do it with MPlayer? You can use this command mplayer -fs -loop 0 video.mp4 Here, -fs make it fullscreen and -loop 0 makes it loop infinitely. For more usage of mplayer,…
I have a text file with many lines of text. In Linux, how to sort the lines by their length? You can make use of awk together with the sort program like awk ‘{ print length(), $0 | “sort -n” }’ /path/to/text/file Here, we use awk to calculate the text length and sort -n to…
On Linux, I check system logs by journalctl. But it is soooo slow. How to make it faster. By default without any options, the journalctl is indeed very slow. But usually, we are only interested in some logs and can use options to specify the logs that we are interested to check. This will make…
How to test whether a string $str contains another string $needle in Bash? You can use this piece of Bash script: [[ “$str” == *”$needle”* ]] A usage example: $ str=”abcde hello” $ needle1=”deh” $ needle2=”de hello” $ [[ “$str” == *”$needle1″* ]] && echo “matched” $ [[ “$str” == *”$needle2″* ]] && echo “matched”…
I am writing a Bash script accepting input of a path from the user. I want to make the path have no trailing ‘/’, such as ‘/path/to/dir’ instead of ‘/path/to/dir/’. However, as the input is from the user, the input could be ‘/path/to/dir’. My script is intended to handle this. The question is: how to…
How to attach and mount Xen DomU’s disk partitions on Linux without Xen? You can use kpartx to create devices from the VM disk image (say, ./vmdisk0). To activate all the partitions in a raw VM disk image: # kpartx -av ./vmdisk0 This will output lines such as: add map loop1p1 (253:8): 0 497664 linear…
How to get a script’s directory reliably in Bash on Linux? For example, to get the directory of the executing script $0. dirname can give you the directory name from the absolute path. You can get the absolute path of the script by readlink -f to handle symbolic links (consider a symbolic link ./run.sh linked…
`xargs` passes the argument once to the utility command specified. For example, xargs cat will cat every line passed to xargs. But how to use the xargs argument twice in the command on Linux? For example, to rename file to file.bak where file is from the stdin. One solution is to write a small script like…
In Firefox on Linux Mint, Google is not in the list of search engines supported. How to add Google in Firefox on Linux Mint? Check this tutorials to add Google in Firefox on Linux Mint: How to Add Google to Firefox in Linux Mint as Default Search Engine
I have downloaded the iso file of Windows 10 installation disk from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO . But I do not have a DVD R/W drive. Whether and how to install Windows from a USB drive? You can use the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool to make a USB from the Windows ISO. Download and install the Windows USB/DVD…