Unix and Linux Weekly Newsletter

Top new questions this week:

In what order do piped commands run?

I've never really thought about how the shell actually executes piped commands. I've always been told that the "stdout of one program gets piped into the stdin of another," as a way of thinking about …

/ pipe / ps  
asked by action_potato 19 votes
answered by Kyle Jones 11 votes

What is a simple way to schedule a single event to happen at some time in the future?

There are often times that I want my computer to do a single task, but not right now. For example, I could have it notify me in 30 minutes that it is time to leave work. Or maybe I want it to run a …

/ command-line / scheduling  
asked by Cory Klein 10 votes
answered by jasonwryan 22 votes

Is disabling barriers for ext4 safe on a laptop with battery?

The manual page says about the barrier option for ext4: Write barriers enforce proper on-disk ordering of journal commits, making volatile disk write caches safe to use, at some performance …

/ hard-disk / performance / ext4 / laptop / cache  
asked by imz 9 votes
answered by Alexios 9 votes

How can I reserve a block of memory from the Linux kernel?

I have a device that needs a block of memory that is reserved solely for it, without the OS intervening. Is there any way to tell BIOS or the OS that a block of memory is reserved, and it must not …

/ linux / kernel / memory / hardware  
asked by Nathan Fellman 8 votes
answered by Warren Young 13 votes

Choosing Linux Distro for PostgreSQL

I'll begin by saying I'm a newbie sys admin. I need a new PostgreSQL 9.1 machine. My go to distro is Debian (for no good reason other than it's what I first learned). However, when I started …

/ linux / postgresql  
asked by LJM 6 votes
answered by Marco 8 votes

Permissions/ownership of /usr/local/bin

From what I understand, the right place to put your own scripts is /usr/local/bin (for instance a script I use to back up some files). I notice that this folder is currently (by default) owned by …

/ permissions / directory-structure / fhs  
asked by user16441 6 votes
answered by uther 8 votes

Why doesn't `echo abc^H` just print `ab`?

As I recall, ^H means Backspace. I generated it by pressing CTRL+V, CTRL+H. So the ^H should remove the last character, as it is the same as Backspace and it should act just as if I pressed Backspace …

/ shell / terminal / special-characters  
asked by Michael 6 votes
answered by jlliagre 14 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

tar: unrecognized option --warning" during 'apt-get install

I just ran apt-get upgrade on my debian 5 vps and I got this error: tar: unrecognized option `--warning=no-timestamp' Now when I try to install other packages e.g: imagemagick I get the same …

/ debian / upgrade / apt / tar  
asked by DanielZ 10 votes
answered by izogi 10 votes

What's a good example of piping commands together?

If you were helping someone to learn the concept of pipes on the command line what example would you use? The example that actually came up was as follows: cat whatever.txt | less I feel like …

/ command-line / pipe  
asked by Matt 8 votes
answered by rahmu 6 votes

Can you answer these?

Connection problems creating a socks server with antinat

How can I run a socks server using antinat. I read the tutorials, but I can't get it working. My firewall is off, but I get the error: proxy server is refusing the connection What could I be …

/ proxy / socks  
asked by Zim3r 1 vote

Error with fetchmail and SSL certificates

I have a problem configuring my mail client on my Mac OS 10.6.8. These were the steps I did: # touch ~/.fetchmailrc I edited the file and created the contents: poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 …

/ osx / ssl / fetchmail  
asked by Luigi Tiburzi 2 votes

Recover many files using ntfsundelete

I am using the following command to scan for deleted files: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 -S 400m-20g -p 100 How can I restore the all of the results? I have tried: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 -u …

/ ubuntu / data-recovery / ntfs  
asked by Mild Fuzz 1 vote
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