Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Anu
10 Tips and Tricks for Linux users.....
1: Making man pages useful
If you are looking for
some help on a particular subject or command, man pages are a good
place to start. You normally access a man page with man
<command>, but you can also search the man page
descriptions for a particular keyword. As an example, search for man
pages that discuss logins:
man -k login
When
you access a man page, you can also use the forward slash key to search
for a particular word within the man page itself. Simply press / on
your keyboard and then type in the search term.
2: Talk to your doctor!
To
say that Emacs is just a text editor is like saying that a Triumph is
just a motorcycle, or the World Cup is just some four-yearly football
event. True, but simplified juuuust a little bit.
An example?
Open the
editor, press the Esc key followed by X and then enter in doctor: you
will be engaged in a surreal conversation by an imaginary and
underskilled psychotherapist. And if you want to waste your time in a
better way Esc-X tetris will transform your 'editor' into the old favourite arcade game.
Does
the madness stop there?
No! Check out your distro's package list to see
what else they've bundled for Emacs: we've got chess, Perl integration,
IRC chat, French translation, HTML conversion, a Java development
environment, smart compilation, and even something called a "semantic
bovinator". We really haven't the first clue what that last one does,
but we dare you to try it out anyway! (Please read the disclaimer
first!)
3: Generating package relationship diagrams
The
most critical part of the Debian system is the ability to install a
package and have the dependencies satisfied automatically. If you would
like a graphical representation of the relationships between these
packages (this can be useful for seeing how the system fits together),
you can use the Graphviz package from Debian non-free (apt-get install
graphviz) and the following command:
apt-cache dotty > debian.dot
The command generated the graph file which can then be loaded into dotty:
dotty debian.dot
4: Unmount busy drives
You
are probably all too familiar with the situation - you are trying to
unmount a drive, but keep getting told by your system that it's busy.
But what application is tying it up? A quick one-liner will tell you:
lsof +D /mnt/windows
This
will return the command and process ID of any tasks currently accessing
the /mnt/windows directory. You can then locate them, or use the kill
command to finish them off.
5: Text file conversion
recode
is a small utility that will save you loads of effort when using text
files created on different platforms. The primary source of discontent
is line breaks. In some systems, these are denoted with a line-feed
character. In others, a carriage return is used. In still more systems,
both are used. The end result is that if you are swapping text from one
platform to another, you end up with too many or too few line breaks,
and lots of strange characters besides.However, the command parameters
of recode are a little arcane, so why not combine this hack with HACK (Trick) 6
in this feature, and set up some useful aliases:
alias dos2unix='recode dos/CR-LF..l1' alias unix2win='recode l1..windows-1250' alias unix2dos='recode l1..dos/CR-LF'
There
are plenty more options for recode - it can actually convert between a
whole range of character sets. Check out the man pages for more
information.
6: Listing today's files only
You
are probably familiar with the problem. Sometime earlier in the day,
you created a text file, which now is urgently required. However, you
can't remember what ridiculous name you gave it, and being a typical
geek, your home folder is full of 836 different files. How can you find
it? Well, there are various ways, but this little tip shows you the
power of pipes and joining together two powerful shell commands:
ls -al --time-style=+%D | grep `date +%D`
The
parameters to the ls command here cause the datestamp to be output in a
particular format. The cunning bit is that the output is then passed to
grep. The grep parameter is itself a command (executed because of the
backticks), which substitutes the current date into the string to be
matched. You could easily modify it to search specifically for other
dates, times, filesizes or whatever. Combine it with HACK (Trick) 6 to save
typing!
7: Avoid common mistypes and long commands
The
alias command is useful for setting up shortcuts for long commands, or
even more clever things. From HACK (Trick) 5, we could make a new command,
lsnew, by doing this:
alias lsnew=" ls -al --time-style=+%D | grep `date +%D` "
But
there are other uses of alias.
For example, common mistyping mistakes.
How many times have you accidentally left out the space when changing to
the parent directory? Worry no more!
alias cd..="cd .."
Alternatively, how about rewriting some existing commands?
alias ls="ls -al"
saves a few keypresses if, like us, you always want the complete list.
To have these shortcuts enabled for every session, just add the alias commands to your user .bashrc file in your home directory.
8: Alter Mozilla's secret settings
If
you find that you would like to change how Mozilla works but the
preferences offer nothing by way of clickable options that can help you,
there is a special mode that you can enable in Mozilla so that you can
change anything. To access it, type this into the address bar:
about:config
You can then change each setting that you are interested in by changing the Value field in the table.
Other interesting modes include general information (about:)details about plugins (about:plugins)credits information (about:credits)some general wisdom (about:mozilla).
9: A backdrop of stars
You
may already have played with KStars, but how about creating a KStars
backdrop image that's updated every time you start up?KStars can be run
with the --dump switch, which dumps out an image from your startup
settings, but doesn't load the GUI at all. You can create a script to
run this and generate a desktop image, which will change every day (or
you can just use this method to generate images).
Run KStars like this:
kstars --dump --width 1024 --height 768 --filename = ~/kstarsback.png
You
can add this to a script in your ~/.kde/Autostart folder to be run at
startup. Find the file in Konqueror, drag it to the desktop and select
'Set as wallpaper' to use it as a randomly generated backdrop.
10: Open an SVG directly
You can run Inkscape from a shell and immediately edit a graphic directly from a URL. Just type:
inkscape http://www.somehost.com/graphic.svg
Remember to save it as something else though!
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OLD IS GOLD
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