Top new questions this week:

Vim: what are all the possible swapfile extensions?

When you're editing a file in vim, it generates a swapfile with the same name as your current file, but with a .swp extension. If .swp is already taken, then it generates one a .swo one. If that's ...

/ vim / filenames

asked by Newb 24 votes answered by Thomas Dickey 35 votes

How does a shell know home(s)?

Each shell has an environment variable $HOME set (ex: /Users/lotolo). If I'm under csh I can unsetenv HOME and still if I do cd I'll be in my home. I've tested this also on bash (unset HOME) and ...

/ bash / cd-command / home / tcsh / csh

asked by LotoLo 19 votes answered by Stéphane Chazelas 29 votes

VirtualBox: Is it a bad idea to assign more virtual CPU cores than number of physical CPU cores

As I have a Hyper-Threading capable CPU, I wonder, is it a bad idea to assign more virtual CPU cores than number of physical CPU cores as the following warning suggests: Transcript: More ...

/ virtualbox / virtual-machine / performance / cpu / hyperthreading

asked by Vlastimil Burian 8 votes answered by Vlastimil Burian 4 votes

How to ensure exclusive CPU availability for a running process?

At first, the question seems to be a little bit silly/confusing as the OS does the job of managing process execution. However, I want to measure how much some processes are CPU/IO-bound and I feel ...

/ debian / ubuntu / process / performance / process-management

asked by Jeanderson Barros Cândido 7 votes answered by Rui F Ribeiro 6 votes

How to print lines number 15 and 25 out of each 50 lines?

I have a large file and I would like print from each sequential 50 lines , the 15th and 25th lines. sed -n '15,25p' inputfile How to modify this command to print only lines 15 and 25 and to loop ...

/ text-processing / sed

asked by Mohsen El-Tahawy 7 votes answered by Stéphane Chazelas 20 votes

Very strange text in Debian

I own a Debian laptop with KDE (although, I have had this problem with other desktop environments too). Occasionally, after I close and re-open my laptop, text starts to appear like this: The text ...

/ debian / fonts

asked by Leo Tenenbaum 6 votes

Command like "paste - -", but sorted alphabetical

I have a textfile like: Adam Bob Cevin David Evan If I "paste - -" it, I get: Adam Bob Cevin David Evan But I need that the lower half will be added as a new column: Adam David Bob Evan ...

/ text-processing / sort

asked by Ystro 6 votes answered by Stéphane Chazelas 9 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Tracking down where disk space has gone on Linux?

When administering Linux systems I often find myself struggling to track down the culprit after a partition goes full. I normally use du / | sort -nr but on a large filesystem this takes a long time ...

/ command-line / disk-usage

asked by Owen Fraser-Green 265 votes answered by Ben Collins 239 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 / networking / dns

asked by eugene y 182 votes answered by Chris Down 221 votes

Can you answer these?

sort --check: continue past first disorder

I would like to get a list of all the places in a large file where the keys decrease from a previous line. I can check if the file is sorted using sort: sort -cns -k1.14,1.15 -k1.1,1.10 file.txt ...

/ sort / coreutils

asked by kundor 2 votes

How to change the keyboard layout for a single application in Awesome WM?

I've added keyboard shortcuts to set the global keyboard layout, but how do I set it for a single application? The reason I'd like to do this is that I'm used to QWERTY for gaming, and I'd rather not ...

/ arch-linux / keyboard-shortcuts / keyboard-layout / awesome

asked by l0b0 4 votes

lxc+btrfs - Create and then remove a dir w/ circular symbolic link causes stale file handle

Environment: debian jessie inside a virtualbox VM using root account in guest and in containers lxc container inside the VM lxc container root file system on btrfs works fine when running in the VM ...

/ btrfs / lxc

asked by Clancy P 2 votes