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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Linux : 10 tips n tricks...


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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About 'Anu': My name is 'Anu' also Known as 'ANU 007 TIGER' .I'm administrator of 'PC Tips by Anu' blog .This blog was opened for sharing contents about hacking n cracking.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OLD IS GOLD

Anonymous said...

"old is always gold"

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