Unix & Linux Weekly Newsletter - Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Top new questions this week: Is there ever a good reason to run sudo su? To launch a root shell on machines where the root account is disabled, you can run one of: sudo -i : run an interactive login shell (reads /root/.bashrc and /root/.profile) sudo -s : run a non-login ... / shell / sudo / environment-variables / su   asked by terdon 33 votes answered by chaos 19 votes Why won't function return until background process ends? Consider this script: #!/bin/bash function start { leafpad & echo $! } PID=$(start) echo "PID is $PID" The script does not continue past its closing brace until the leafpad process ends, ... / bash / shell-script / background-process / command-substitution   asked by user234565 11 votes answered by Adrien M. 13 votes Equivalent command to grep binary files I have a bunch of binaries and I know that inside these binaries there are strings I want to find. I want to do a: grep -lir "the string I am looking for" and get a list of all binaries inside a ... / grep   asked by SpaceDog 9 votes answered by cuonglm 8 votes What does the `-C` flag exactly do in `scp`? I always use either rsync or scp in order to copy file from/to a remote machine. Recently, I discovered in the manual of scp (man scp) the flag -C -C Compression enable. Passes the -C flag to ... / scp / compression / file-transfer   asked by Remi.b 8 votes answered by Celada 5 votes How can I make a script to count up by fives? I was trying to make a very simple bash script to list all of the multiples of five between 375 and 3500 (375, 380, 385...). One thing that I tried and didn't work is: for i in {375..3500} do ... / bash / shell / scripting   asked by aswine 8 votes answered by Muzer 18 votes How is install different from cp? How is install different from a simple copy, cp or dd? I just compiled a little utility and want to add it to /usr/sbin so it becomes available via my PATH variable. Why use one vs the other? / software-installation / cp / file-copy   asked by tarabyte 7 votes answered by cakuzo 6 votes Why does sudo need the loopback interface? We were trying to install our software on an Ubuntu machine. To do so, we needed root privileges. Basically, all we needed to do was run a runnable jar like: sudo java -jar runnableJar.jar. All such ... / sudo / hostname   asked by Sriram 7 votes answered by steve 5 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: 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 / dns   asked by eugene y 101 votes answered by Chris Down 107 votes Preserve bash history in multiple terminal windows I consistently have more than one terminal open. Anywhere from two to ten, doing various bits and bobs. Now let's say I restart and open up another set of terminals. Some remember certain things, some ... / bash / command-history   asked by Oli 192 votes answered by user348 112 votes Can you answer these? My Fedora 22 unable to discover wifi networks? It worked fine till yesterday all of sudden it is unable discover nearby access points.Even I tried to connect to manually it didn't work lspci | grep BCM 07:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom ... / fedora / wifi   asked by user125153 1 vote Automounting of USB pendrives on Debian 8 XFCE desktop not working The icons appear on the desktop but I still have to mount them. I must be missing something, mustn't I? / debian / xfce   asked by Dieter.Wilhelm 1 vote how to make aspell ignore upper case words (acronyms)? aspell seems to have some support for filters: http://aspell.net/0.50-doc/man-html/4_Customizing.html#filter but I can't find any way to tell it to ignore words that are all capital letters (typically ... / emacs / aspell   asked by fommil 2 votes

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