Tips & How-To's

Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

I love Unity, especially the lens feature. While going through the Ubuntu store, found this neat little lens for initiating an SSH connection. The lens parses your ~/.ssh/known_hosts & ~/.ssh/config files and provides you with a list of servers that you can connect to. Just install the lens, logout & login back to your desktop and you're good to go. To search, just bring up Unity dash by hitting the Super (aka Windows) key, type either the username or host and just hit enter to initiate the connection.

Going through Ask Ubuntu, found a nice answer on keyboard shortcuts for Ubuntu Unity. Now if that’s too much for you to remember, Octavian Damiean has created this sweet wallpaper with the shortcuts and gestures overlayed on it. Click on the above image for a full size version, or a here’s a SVG version if you prefer the same.

Is there any way to remove all of the files in a directory except for one with a certain filename? For instance, if I had a directory containing the files file1, file2, and dontdelete. Would there be any way to quickly delete file1, and file2 and not dontdelete? I know that I could just do rm file1 file2 but that wouldn’t work for a bunch of files. Also, I’m on Mac OS X if that makes a difference

ln -s d1 d2 # Am I the only person who gets this the wrong way round every fucking time? Similar to most people who have posted there - I used to still get it wrong every time. It’s become a habit for me to do a man ln or ln -help before I execute this command :\ Great tip here though: but then I finally found out about the relationship between ln and cp

I’ve used find extensively and always wanted to writeup a nice post on this, but the linked post trumps my effort! Copy pasted from his blog, as the person’s allowed to do so. Also, as a general note - before using exec with the actual command, do preview it! remove empty directories # # find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \; change various file attributes # find .

I did something crazy at some point that created a file called “-rf” on my filesystem. Now I can’t figure out how to delete it. I’ve tried rm "-rf" rm \-rf But these just exit immediately. Arrgh! Anyone know how to remove this file? Preferably without accidentally cleaning out my whole folder. heh. What’re the odds, eh? via Removing “-rf” file in Unix - Super User.

I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my repis a testament to that I guess ;) ) - both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by). Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question - which went like - I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.

Quick tip - if you use the Terminal as much as I do, ever been in a situation where you’ve written a particularly long command, and then want to issue that command again but can’t recall it ? Use the history command, and pipe it to grep to search it! history | grep -i <search-term> This will give you all commands with the search term and the corresponding line number.

Starcraft 2 [runs] under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game’s official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages - so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or CrossoverGames 9.1. Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as “officially support” and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer.