Unix & Linux Weekly Newsletter - Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Top new questions this week: Why would I tar a single file? At my company, we download a local development database snapshot as a db.dump.tar.gz file. The compression makes sense, but the tarball only contains a single file (db.dump). Is there any point to ... / tar / compression / archive   asked by gardenhead 86 votes answered by jofel 151 votes I accidentally typed my password into the login field, is it still secure? I was looking down at my keyboard and typed my password in because I thought I had already typed my login name. I pressed Enter, then when it asked for the password I pressed Ctrl+c. Should I take ... / security / login / password   asked by user_23112 58 votes answered by Gilles 91 votes How do I create a blank PDF from the command line? I recently needed a single blank PDF page (8.5" x 11" size) and realized that I didn't know how to make one from the command line. Issuing touch blank.pdf produces an empty PDF file. Is there a ... / command-line / pdf   asked by Brian Fitzpatrick 31 votes answered by BartekChom 45 votes Is an iso file a filesystem in its own right? I am trying to understand what the relationship a xxx.iso file has to the other aspects of a block device, e.g. partitions and a file system. It's common for people to describe accessing or making a ... / filesystems / iso   asked by the_velour_fog 26 votes answered by Jenny D 47 votes How can I work with binary in bash, to copy bytes verbatim without any conversion? I am ambitiously trying to translate a c++ code into bash for a myriad of reasons. This code reads and manipulates a file type specific to my sub-field that is written and structured completely in ... / bash / binary / head   asked by neurocoder 11 votes answered by Stéphane Chazelas 18 votes Scalability of 'sort -u' for gigantic files What is reasonable scalability limit of 'sort -u' ? (in dimensions of "line length", "amount of lines", "total file size"?) What is Unix alternative for files exceeding this in dimension of "amount ... / sort   asked by Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 10 votes answered by Anthon 23 votes Move first N lines of output to end without using temporary file Imagine an output of a command like 44444 55555 11111 22222 33333 how can I yank the first N lines (first two in the example above) and append them at the end, but without using temp file (so only ... / command-line / text-processing   asked by Peter 9 votes answered by don_crissti 13 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: Trying to SSH to local VM Ubuntu with Putty I have set up a VM of Ubuntu server, have installed OpenSSH, and am now trying to connect to it using Putty. Within Putty, under "Host name", I put "Ubuntu", given this is what I thought it was called ... / ubuntu / virtualbox / putty   asked by wickywills 29 votes answered by michas 29 votes Why do I need a tty to run sudo if I can sudo without a password? I have configured sudo to run without a password, but when I try to ssh 'sudo Foo", I still get sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo. Why does this happen and how can I work around it? / linux / bash / ssh / sudo   asked by merlin2011 115 votes answered by Stéphane Chazelas 159 votes Can you answer these? How to support 64-bit times on a 32-bit Linux platform I need to support 64-bit times on a 32-bit ARM embedded Linux system based on kernel version 4.1. I use clock_gettime() and clock_settime() to get/set the time, but they are limited to 32-bit seconds ... / linux / kernel / time   asked by user5071535 2 votes How to shard file into n-out-of-m redundancy (kind of reed solomon)? How to shard file file into m files, so it can be recovered with any n of them ? It's like Reed-Solomon error correction (sth more flexible than RAID6) style of redundancy. Early findings: I've ... / backup / redundancy / reed-solomon / encoding   asked by Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 3 votes Cron vs systemd timers [NOTE: The intent of this question is to help people evaluate whether systemd timers would be a good choice for their job timing needs. Many (most?) people are probably using cron, but maybe some are ... / cron / systemd-timer   asked by Faheem Mitha 6 votes

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