How to stop and remove the gvfs-metadata service on your Ubuntu system The gvfs system that comes with the Gnome and MATE desktops also saves metadata about the users web download history. This is interesting, I thought only Firefox saved your download history, but gvfs saves this too. Use this command to see the saved … Read more
It is very simple to show a banner to your users, that explains the terms of use for an SSH connection upon the user reaching a login prompt. Firstly, create a file named info in the /etc/ssh directory. sudo touch /etc/ssh/infosudo touch /etc/ssh/info Then put this in it. *************************************************************************** NOTICE TO USERS This … Read more
To find the largest file in a directory; use the du command and this will return the information you are after. Using the pipe symbol to send the text through to the head command will allow us to only return the one file we are interested in. jason@jason-desktop:~/Documents$ find . -type f -exec ls -al … Read more
The tail command is a good way to see new content in a file, but it is monochrome output. But there is a better way to monitor files. Use the multitail command instead. This will print muticolored output when printing the last few lines of a file. Install this utility. sudo apt install multitailsudo apt … Read more
The Midnight Commander file manager for Linux is indispensable for any serious Linux desktop or command line user. The ability to quickly copy or move files from one place to another and edit source code is amazing. Files can be copied between panes with the F5 key. F6 to move files. F8 will delete them. … Read more
Blocking access to the .htaccess file on your Apache web server blocks access to the file by curious web users that want to see what directives are in it. The code below added to the .htaccess file will forbid all access to the .htaccess file by web users while still allowing it to function. #Deny … Read more
I think I may have posted this before, but this is a little program I am working on that writes a text string to a file. I have got it to work perfectly and it compiles without errors using gcc -Wall. /* * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify * … Read more
Here is one for any experimenters out there… It is possible to create files which simply cannot be deleted from the standard shell. To do this you will have to physically create the file using a script or a text editor, and you will have to use a sequence of control characters which cannot be … Read more
If you are using a remote server with SSH and you wish to get a large file off the Internet to the remote server easily, you may use the wget command to download it directly to the server instead of having to download it at home and then upload it again. That is silly. Use … Read more
The steghide program is used to embed one image inside another. I will be showing you how to embed a text file inside an image and then set a passphrase to use when recovering the text file. This is a simple example, I am embedding the file my.txt into a screenshot from a movie. root@user:~# … Read more
Windows 8.1 has a feature that not many people know about. You can press Win-PrtScr to take a screenshot and save it straight to the hard disk. The screenshots are saved in the Users/Homer/Pictures/Screenshots folder. This is a very useful way to take a screenshot and save it straight to the disk without having to … Read more
How to read a file and display the contents with Python. This sample code reads and outputs the contents of a file using Python. This is a very simple code sample for reading in a file and displaying it. #!/usr/bin/env python forme = "f.txt"; # Read a file and print the contents to … Read more
Here I am using the watch ‘tail access.log’ command to watch the access log file for the Apache web server. This will update every two seconds and show changes to the logfile when someone accesses the server. Every 2.0s: tail access.log Tue Jul 2 10:26:04 2013 77.78.106.75 – – [30/Jun/2013:18:03:09 +1000] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" … Read more
This command will set the timestamp of a file in Linux to be in the past. I am not sure what use this is, but it shows what you can do with the Linux command line. john@adeptus-mechanicus ~/Documents $ touch -t 200510071138 root.jpeg john@adeptus-mechanicus ~/Documents $ ls root.jpeg -rw-r–r– 1 john john 385K 07-10-05 11:38 … Read more
This is my /etc/fstab file. # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use ‘blkid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> … Read more
The Windows 8 launch is past and there are stories floating around that the computers running this operating system are polluted with crapware that slows down the machines and provides no real benefit. When I bought my ASUS eePC netbook; it was running Windows XP Professional with the extra ASUS crapware installed that is supposed … Read more
Ubuntu 12.10 Nautilus file manager. The all new look. Do you like this look or not? I just installed the latest Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal ISO and this is the all new look of the Nautilus file manager. Ubuntu 12.10 is quite impressive, I installed the distribution from the Live CD by running ubiquity –no-bootloader … Read more
The file manager on the old Macintosh Operating System looks just like the Gnome Nautilus file manager on Linux. I was using my brother’s iMac today and I was amazed at how much a very old version of Macintosh OS looks just like Gnome. The Macintosh operating system is better than Windows, it is not … Read more