Linux

I’ve been thinking about doing this exact thing recently. I was so delighted to run across this post and WriterDeck.org. After reading through this, I installed Ubuntu 26.04 on my Rapsberry Pi 4 B and did this exact thing using Sway: tldr: I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all) I added some packages to make it work better for writing: network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I’m away kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty tmux for a nice status bar and rudimentary screen tiling, as well as acpi and light for battery and backlight details, respectfully neovim as my editor and vim-vimwiki to give myself a personal wiki syncthing to sync and backup my work — It’s time to talk about my writerdeck by Veronica Explains

I installed Ubuntu Desktop 26.04 (Resolute Racoon) last week. I’ve been surprised at how nice it is to use! That said I ran into a disk space issue this AM. This was strange. I haven’t even been installing much of anything on it! Here’s how I fixed it… Pressing ESC during boot let me see it was hanging trying to start the Gnome Display Manager (GDM) service. Pressing SHIFT let me boot into recovery mode and login. ...

Today, I learned about shell process substitution from Bread on Penguin’s latest video. Assume you have two files: $ cat file1 a b c $ cat file2 c b a To see if they are identical when sorted without manually creating your own temporary files, you can: diff <(sort file1) <(sort file2) What is happening here? <() is doing process substitution, which is running the command and then exposing its output as a temporary file. ...

I got bit by this again today, so I’m writing it down so I can reference it later. When running docker logs -f CONTAINER_NAME | grep -v "foo" | jq, it is important to consider grep’s buffers. I am using GNU grep and, by default, it uses block buffering when not connected to a terminal (which is my case, since I piped it to jq). This means jq doesn’t get any input until a large-ish amount of text (4k? 8k?) is sent to grep. Since container I was inspecting logs little, I got zero log lines. ...

This post documents the high level concepts I need to remember about *nix Load Average. Load average can been seen in the output of uptime and top: From uptime: $ uptime 14:40 up 21 days, 21:48, 5 users, load averages: 2.63 2.75 3.45 From top: root@blog-server-2:~# top -n 1 | head -2 top - 15:28:37 up 10 days, 12:41, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.03, 0.00 Tasks: 95 total, 1 running, 94 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie root@blog-server-2:~# There are 3 decimal numbers shown. They present the load average over three different time scales: ...

I recently was having to work with Ansible for several days to deploy changes globally across prod. I was storing my playbook limit in a file like so: [18:45] james_simas@widget ~/Downloads $ cat limit.txt host1.domain.com host2.domain.com host3.domain.com At one point, I needed to use supply the list of hostnames in BASH, but rather than having them be newline separated, I needed them to be separated by commas like this: host1.domain.com,host2.domain.com,host3.domain.com I didn’t want to modify my original files (I still needed them) and this seemed like a problem somebody else has problably solved. I Googled a bit and found an answer using tr. ...

Send 10,000 requests, using 10 sockets at a time: ab -n 10000 -c 10 https://10.10.10.10/ Send requests with a BIG-IP persistence cookie: ab -n 10000 -C BIGipServerMyPool=1677787402.36895.0000 http://10.10.10.10/

Miscellaneous: Run script with verbose output: bash -v Check for syntax errors: bash -n Show xtrace info: bash -x Lines which start with + are executed in the shell Lines which start with ++ are executed in a sub-shell Loop over alphabet with upper and lower case: for l in {{A..Z},{a..z}}; do echo $l ; done Print text in beautiful columns by piping to: column -t Echo a string to stderr: >&2 echo Hello, world. Keyboard shortcuts: ...

Display response code and total time: curl -s -w "%{http_code} - %{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null www.jamessimas.com curl multiple IPs with one command: curl 10.20.20.8[0-9]:80/ Overriding DNS: curl --resolve "www.jamessimas.com:80/10.11.12.13" www.jamessimas.com

Delimited: The delimiter in the below examples is :. Show field 1: cut -f 1 -d : /etc/password Show field 2 and sort results numerically: cut -f 2 -d : /etc/password | sort -n Show all fields after field 1: cut -d: -f 2: Show fields 1 through 2: cut -d : -f1-2 Miscellaneous: Cut 10 from start of line: cut -c -10