You can press F1 in htop to view the help manual, this will show you the color meanings as illustrated below:
You have probably looked up the parameters for tar more than you’ve changed socks. And what if the scenario from xkcd ever became real? Could you really run a valid tar command without googling first?
Here’s a few tricks to help you remember how to use tar if you want to extract files from an archive, either .tar , .gz or tar.bz2
| -x | extract |
| -f | file |
That’s it! All you need is tar -xf <filename>
Many guides will use -xvfz (or -xfzv or -xfvz or whatever), but -v and -z are not actually necessary.
-z is only used to tell tar it’s a .gz file, but for the last 15 years or so tar have been able to automatically detect this itself.
The other parameter, -v, is not necessary either, but it can be quite useful as it simply means verbose (extended/detailed) output in the terminal window.
So you if you want to see the progress of the file operation, include -v as well, so the final command becomes:
tar -xvf <filename>
Remember it by saying out loud: tar eXtract Verbose File <filename>
Or, as mentioned, simply use: tar -xf <filename> (tar eXtract File <filename>)
If your KDE Plasma environment is hanging or freezing you don’t necessarily have to logout and login. Open the Search/Run prompt by pressing ALT+F2 and enter konsole to open your terminal.
Then simply issue the necessary command to restart plasma shell.
For KDE4:
killall plasma-desktop
kstart plasma-desktop
KDE5:
killall plasmashell
kstart plasmashell
KDE5.10 and above:
kquitapp5 plasmashell
kstart5 plasmashell
Credits goes out to Korcia at this AskUbuntu thread.
Bash supports coloring text, but I never remember the syntax, so here’s a little cheat sheet. During my little research it also seems you can enter the color codes in two ways as illustrated below:
echo -e "\033[0;32m Hello world!"
echo -e "\e[32m Hello world!"
Some more examples:
I’m not sure if there’s any reason to choose one or the other, but the latter example is arguably easier to remember.
All color codes:
Reset color 0
Black 0;30
Blue 0;34
Green 0;32
Cyan 0;36
Red 0;31
Purple 0;35
Brown/Orange 0;33
Light Gray 0;37
Dark Gray 1;30
Light Blue 1;34
Light Green 1;32
Light Cyan 1;36
Light Red 1;31
Light Purple 1;35
Yellow 1;33
White 1;37
You can also do lots of other things in bash, such as blinking text, bold, etc. Take a look at this site for more examples.
If you like to create CLI tools, adding some colors will make it a lot more immersive and easier to read output, like this example:
| Linux | Windows | Description |
| sudo <cmd> | runas /user:admin <cmd> | This will run the command with admin-privileges on Linux, while on Windows it’ll simply run as the user provided (so you need to run as a user who has local administrator rights) |
| cat src1.js src2.js > compiled.js | type src1.js src2.js > compiled.js | Combine two or more files into one |
| ifconfig | ipconfig | Shows network information |
| traceroute | tracert | Trace an address and show routes |
| uptime | net stats server or net stats workstation | Windows don’t have a builtin command to show uptime in days, but this command will show you when the machine was last booted (do the math) |
| ls | dir | Show directory contents |
| free | mem | Show available RAM |
I started on this article a couple years ago but was quickly forgotten in the drafts bin. Now I actually don’t have any Windows computers available anymore and can’t be arsed to look up more commands so this’ll have to work for now.
Some simple commands such as cd, mkdir, rm, rmdir has been ignored for now as they’re equal in both operating systems.
Please post a comment below if you know of any useful commands available on both operating systems.
You might’ve noticed that Snap apps creates a loopback disk used for mounting the image file for the app. This clutters the UI of fdisk, df and other disk related tools.
A typical fdisk -l could show you this:
Since most regular drives starts as /dev/sd* you could simply grep the output:
sudo fdisk -l | grep "Disk /dev/sd"
Or even better, use sudo fdisk -l | grep -v "loop". The -v parameter means grep reverts the keyword so anything containing “loop” will not be shown.
Another example: df -h:
Now: df -h | grep -v loop
Note regarding grep: You only need to add quotation marks around the keyword if it’s a string which contains spaces. Single words don’t need quotes.
You can also pipe it several times through grep, like this:
sudo df -h | grep -v loop | grep -v tmp
Or take a look at this Stackoverflow thread for more grep variants
I just upgraded from 18.04 to 18.10 yesterday, but to my dismay, the new fancy theme, Yaru, was nowhere to be found. Looked around in Gnome Tweaks to no avail. Turns out some of the theme packages were not properly installed, more specifically the yaru-theme-gtk package.
Enter the command apt search yaru-* to see installation status of every package containing “yaru-*”. If they are installed they will state [Installed] inside the square brackets, like so:
If they’re not installed, you can simply fix the issue by running sudo apt install yaru-*. Once complete, log out and back in, and the theme files will be available in Gnome Tweaks.
Voila! Remember to also set Cursor, Icons and Sound theme to Yaru in Gnome Tweaks if desired.
On two occasions I have experienced that my Dell Latitude laptops has twitchy touchpads. This has happened on both Ubuntu 18.04 and elementaryOS 0.4 some years ago.
The fix, so far, has simply been to reinstall the xserver driver plus some additional software:
sudo apt remove xserver-xorg-input-libinput
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
Then reboot computer.
lsb_release -d | cut -d: -f2
lsb_release -a
cat /etc/*release
Ever wondered if today’s Friday? Yeah me too, every day.
Keep yourself updated with this simple function.
1) Open your profile settings file
nano ~/.bashrc
2) Enter the following function in the bottom
yay() {
day=$(date +%u)
if [ "$day" == "5" ];
then
echo "YAY, IT'S FRIDAY!!!"
else
echo "Not to bring you down, but it's not friday yet :("
fi
}
3) Reload your config file
. ~/.bashrc
4) Try it out! Just type yay in your terminal window whenever you wonder if it’s Friday or not.