Top new questions this week:

Does tail read the whole file?

If I want to tail a 25 GB textfile, does the tail command read the whole file? Since a file might be scattered on a disk I imagine it has to, but I do not understand such internals well.

/ tail

asked by The Unfun Cat 62 votes answered by jlliagre 79 votes

Pronunciation for /usr directory

How do you pronunce /usr? I found in the net that someone reads it "user"... but, for what I know, this directory is not related to the user. The meaning of the acronym is "Unix specific (or system) …

/ directory

asked by bluish 38 votes answered by Thomas Nyman 44 votes

How do I get a websites title using command line?

I want a command line program that prints the title of a website. For e.g.: Alan:~ titlefetcher http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7dQh8u4Hc should give: Why Are Bad Words Bad? You give it the …

/ command-line / web / http

asked by Ufoguy 21 votes answered by Stephane Chazelas 23 votes

Is there any difference between mode value 0777 and 777

I saw a code change at work, where the mode values were changed from 777 to 0777 to make nfs setattr work. What is the difference in the 2 values?

/ permissions

asked by user1071840 12 votes answered by alexis 19 votes

Split text file into short lines for reading?

Is there a program that can take a plain-text file with long lines, and add a newline after a certain number of characters, only splitting at words, to make it readable? For example, take this: Lorem …

/ text-processing

asked by Lucas Phillips 10 votes answered by slm 15 votes

Moving a file to a file that is being read

When a file is moved and the destination file already exists and is currently being read, will the operation succeed? Will it depend on how long the reading operation on the destination file lasts?

/ io / concurrency

asked by Desmond Hume 9 votes answered by Elias Probst 10 votes

POSIX compliant way to work with a list of filenames possibly with whitespace

I have seen Bash scripting guides suggesting the use of array for working with filenames containing whitespace. DashAsBinSh however suggests that arrays are not portable so I am looking for a POSIX …

/ shell-script / filenames / quoting / posix / whitespace

asked by Eero Aaltonen 8 votes answered by Patrick 3 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Getting tmux to copy a buffer to the clipboard

I am trying to figure out a decent way to copy what I have in a tmux buffer into my clipboard. I have tried a couple of different things like bind-key p select-pane -t 2 \; split-window 'xsel -i …

/ keyboard-shortcuts / tmux / clipboard / copy-paste / xclip

asked by Digital Powers 32 votes answered by Gilles 12 votes

How can I resolve a hostname to an IP address in a Bash script?

What's the most concise way to resolve a hostname to an IP address in a Bash script? I'm using Arch Linux.

/ linux / bash / dns

asked by eugene y 41 votes answered by manatwork 43 votes

Can you answer these?

Adding wlan0 to xenbr0

I'm setting up xen on debian to do some testing and having problems with the bridge. I would like to use wlan0 as the bridge, but can't seem to get this working. Currently I have tried this: # This …

/ networking / wifi / xen / bridge

asked by A_Porcupine 2 votes

What is the difference between the output of TOP command and Oprofile?

In the top command one of the processes is always showing a CPU usage of 4 to 5%. But in oprofile the CPU usage is 0.004%. I do not understand this. And I also noticed that even when a process is in …

/ linux / embedded / top / profiling

asked by New to embedded 3 votes

bold text when using 256 colors

I am configuring colors in Mutt, but I think my problem is general to linux terminal. For the 16 predefined colors (such as red) I can make it bold, by specifying brightred However, when using 256 …

/ terminal / colors / mutt

asked by Martin Vegter 3 votes