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1500 questions
154
votes
6 answers

Where is bash's history stored?

If I run history, I can see my latest executed commands. But if I do tail -f $HISTFILE or tail -f ~/.bash_history, they do not get listed. Does the file get locked, is there a temporary location or something similar?
Adionditsak
  • 3,935
154
votes
5 answers

chroot "jail" - what is it and how do I use it?

I have heard/read a lot about the chroot jail under linux but have never yet used it (I use Fedora day-to-day), so what is a chroot "jail"? When and why might I use it/not use it and is there anything else I should know? How would I go about…
user119
153
votes
4 answers

How do I find on which physical device a folder is located?

Specifically: I did sudo mkdir /work, and would like to verify it indeed sits on my harddrive and not mapped to some other drive. How do I check where this folder is physically located?
ripper234
  • 31,763
151
votes
2 answers

How to show the filesystem type via the terminal?

Possible Duplicate: How to tell what type of filesystem you’re on? Find filesystem of an unmounted partition from a script How can I quickly check the filesystem of the partition? Can I do that by using df?
tux_drummer
  • 1,853
151
votes
1 answer

Understanding the -exec option of `find`

I find myself constantly looking up the syntax of find . -name "FILENAME" -exec rm {} \; mainly because I don't see how exactly the -exec part works. What is the meaning of the braces, the backslash and the semicolon? Are there other use cases for…
Zsolt Szilagy
  • 1,637
151
votes
5 answers

Understanding the exclamation mark (!) in bash

I used history | less to get the lines of previous commands and from the numbers on the left hand side I found the line I wanted repeated (eg. 22) and did !22 at the command prompt and it worked -- executing the set of commands on the line I did…
Vass
  • 5,371
151
votes
6 answers

How does Linux handle multiple consecutive path separators (/home////username///file)?

I'm working on a python script that passes file locations to an scp subprocess. That's all fine, but I'm in a situation where I may end up concatenating a path with a filename such that there's a double '/ in the path. I know that bash doesn't care…
Falmarri
  • 13,047
151
votes
10 answers

Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop using VMware Player. I am not sure why but I have an account called "User Account" in addition to my account that I usually login to use Ubuntu. Well that was just a side comment but basically all I am trying…
fsolano94
  • 1,647
151
votes
6 answers

Usage of dash (-) in place of a filename

For a command, if using - as an argument in place of a file name will mean STDIN or STDOUT. But in this example, it creates a file with the name -: echo hello > - How can I make - in this example mean STDOUT? Conversely, how can I make - mean a…
Tim
  • 101,790
151
votes
3 answers

Have backticks (i.e. `cmd`) in *sh shells been deprecated?

I've seen this comment many times on Unix & Linux as well as on other sites that use the phrasing "backticks have been deprecated", with respect to shells such as Bash & Zsh. Is this statement true or false?
slm
  • 369,824
150
votes
5 answers

What is yum equivalent of 'apt-get update'?

Debian's apt-get update fetches and updates the package index. Because I'm used to this way of doing things, I was surprised to find that yum update does all that and upgrades the system. This made me curious of how to update the package index…
tshepang
  • 65,642
150
votes
7 answers

Error using SCP: "not a regular file"

I have been searching for a while and I can't find the definition of a regular file. My path is permanent (I start at /) and I am connecting to scp root@IP: /path/to/picture.jpg Results in an inquiry for a password and then... scp: .: not a regular…
JeffM
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150
votes
3 answers

Recursive glob?

I'd like to write something like this: $ ls **.py in order to get all .py filenames, recursively walking a directory hierarchy. Even if there are .py files to find, the shell (bash) gives this output: ls: cannot access **.py: No such file or…
Paolo
  • 17,355
150
votes
5 answers

How to escape quotes in the bash shell?

I'm having trouble with escaping characters in bash. I'd like to escape single and double quotes while running a command under a different user. For the purposes of this question let's say I want to echo the following on the screen: 'single quote…
m33lky
  • 2,585
150
votes
16 answers

Where should I put software I compile myself?

I need to compile some software on my Fedora machine. Where's the best place to put it so not to interfere with the packaged software?
theotherreceive
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