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1500 questions
244
votes
11 answers

How can I edit multiple files in Vim?

I know I can open multiple files with vim by doing something like vim 2011-12*.log, but how can I switch between files and close the files one at a time? Also, how can I tell the file name of the current file that I'm editing?
cwd
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243
votes
4 answers

How can get a list of all scheduled cron jobs on my machine?

My sysadmin has set up a bunch of cron jobs on my machine. I'd like to know exactly what is scheduled for what time. How can I get that list?
Frank
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243
votes
9 answers

What does etc stand for?

What does the "etc" folder in the root directory stand for? I think knowing this will help me remember where certain files are located. Update: Might be useful for others, the folder is used for "Host specific configuration files" - reference.
David Tang
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243
votes
3 answers

Why is 'ls' suddenly wrapping items with spaces in single quotes?

I just noticed that on one of my machines (running Debian Sid) whenever I type ls any file name with spaces has single quotes surrounding it. I immediately checked my aliases, only to find them intact. wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ ls 'test 1.txt' …
Wyatt Ward
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243
votes
10 answers

Terminal prompt not wrapping correctly

I have an issue where if I type in very long commands in bash the terminal will not render what I'm typing correctly. I'd expect that if I had a command like the following: username@someserver ~/somepath $ ssh -i…
Muricula
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241
votes
5 answers

How to rsync only new files

I am trying to set up rsync to synchronize my main web server to the remote server by adding newly generated file to the latter. Here is the command that I use: rsync -avh --update -e "ssh -i /path/to/thishost-rsync-key"…
supermario
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241
votes
4 answers

Combined `mkdir` and `cd`?

is there any way (what is the easiest way in bash) to combine the following: mkdir foo cd foo The manpage for mkdir does not describe anything like that, maybe there is a fancy version of mkdir? I know that cd has to be shell builtin, so the same…
Jasper
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241
votes
2 answers

There are stopped jobs (on bash exit)

I get the message There are stopped jobs. when I try to exit a bash shell sometimes. Here is a reproducible scenario in python 2.x: ctrl+c is handled by the interpreter as an exception. ctrl+z 'stops' the process. ctrl+d exits python for…
ThorSummoner
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240
votes
11 answers

Where are cron errors logged?

If I setup cron jobs incorrectly they appear to silently fail. Where should I look for an error log to understand what went wrong?
Brian Lyttle
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239
votes
9 answers

How to delete directories based on `find` output?

I issue the following command to find the .svn directories: find . -name ".svn" That gives me the following results: ./toto/.svn ./toto/titi/.svn ./toto/tata/.svn How could I process all these lines with rm -fr in order to delete the directories…
Arnaud
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238
votes
5 answers

How to get the complete and exact list of mounted filesystems in Linux?

I usually use mount to check which filesystems are mounted. I also know there is some connection between mount and /etc/mtab but I'm not sure about the details. After reading How to check if /proc/ is mounted I get more confused. My question is: How…
xanpeng
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238
votes
10 answers

What makes grep consider a file to be binary?

I have some database dumps from a Windows system on my box. They are text files. I'm using cygwin to grep through them. These appear to be plain text files; I open them with text editors such as notepad and wordpad and they look legible. However,…
user394
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238
votes
3 answers

What's the difference between semicolon and double ampersand &&

What is the difference between echo "Hello " ; echo "world" and echo "Hello " && echo "world" Both seems to run the two commands after each other.
lindhe
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238
votes
8 answers

Find where inodes are being used

So I received a warning from our monitoring system on one of our boxes that the number of free inodes on a filesystem was getting low. df -i output shows this: Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 524288 422613 …
phemmer
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238
votes
8 answers

What's the difference between /sbin/nologin and /bin/false

Technically, unless pam is set up to check your shell with pam_shells neither of these can actually prevent your login, if you're not on the shell. On my system they are even different sizes, so I suspect they actually do something. So what's the…
xenoterracide
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