Top new questions this week:

How to run a command without hitting Enter Key?

Accidently I mapped Enter key via xkbset to Pointer_button2. Now every time I hit Enter some gibberish text appears. I thought of a workaround involving remapping it back but that means I will have to …

/ keyboard / keyboard-shortcuts

asked by user13107 33 votes answered by camh 38 votes

Why people recommend the -j3 option for make when having a dual-core CPU?

In Gentoo Linux it is possible to set the MAKEOPTS variable in /etc/portage/make.conf to tell make how many jobs it should run in parallel when building packages. Since I have a dual-core CPU, I …

/ gentoo / make

asked by Francesco Turco 10 votes answered by Netch 3 votes

How to measure light?

I've got a Dell Latitude E6410 notebook which changes lcd light intensity in response to ambient light levels, so it has to have some photocell. How can I access the data from this photocell? I tried …

/ linux / hardware / monitors / sensors / brightness

asked by gadelat 9 votes answered by sch 5 votes

How to combine 2 -name conditions in find?

I would like to search for files that would not match 2 -name conditions. I can do it like so : find /media/d/ -type f -size +50M ! -name "*deb" ! -name "*vmdk" and this will yield proper result …

/ bash / shell / find

asked by Patryk 9 votes answered by Alex Leach 4 votes

Why are wc -m and wc -c different?

As a C programmer, I was surprised to see that wc -c (which count the number of bytes), and wc -m (which counts the number of characters) output very different results for a long, text file of mine. I …

/ character-encoding / locale / wc

asked by qdii 6 votes answered by Michael Mrozek 13 votes

When is it useful to use "grep -- SOMEPATTERN"?

So under Linux/AIX where ever.., when is it useful to use: grep -- SOMEPATTERN the Question is the "--" part. When is it usefull to use?

/ bash / grep / ksh

asked by gasko peter 6 votes answered by sch 15 votes

How to fix a terminal after a binary file has been dumped inside it?

After having played with curl, a binary file has been dumped inside my terminal. For example, the horizontal lines: ─ I use to format my prompt are replaced by 'q', and it can be much worse. Why …

/ terminal

asked by Antoine 6 votes answered by m0nhawk 10 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Mount Google Drive in Linux?

Now that Google Drive is available, how do we mount it to a Linux filesystem? Similar solutions exist for Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files.

/ filesystems / mount

asked by briankb 10 votes answered by briankb 5 votes

Why Mac applications never get "closed"?

I'm a Linux/Windows/Mac user. I like all systems, *nixes more than Windows, but I like all nonethless. I started using a Mac this year, and a difference between Linux and Windows that I can't …

/ osx / window

asked by Somebody still uses you MS-DOS 11 votes answered by wrosecrans 30 votes

Can you answer these?

Unable to mount root fs after new kernel compile

So, I'm attempting to compile and use the 3.6.2 kernel on my Debian 6 VM (running under Windows 7 in VMware Workstation 9). I've already had several hick ups, but I am slowly getting through them but …

/ linux / debian / kernel / compiling / linux-kernel

asked by basica 1 vote

Find files that were not installed by the package manager

I'd like to get a list of all files in my Gentoo Linux system that were not installed by the package manager (Portage). This is because I want to keep my system as clean as possible, removing all …

/ find / gentoo / symlink

asked by Francesco Turco 4 votes

Should I investigate Rocks or Ubuntu/Mosix for building a cluster?

I work at a college doing system administration. Someone in their lab is looking to build a cluster for running complex Octave and C++ projects. They have brand new modern machines. My question is …

/ software-rec / cluster

asked by Lawrence Goetz 1 vote