If you are looking at file listings (ls) in Terminal on your Linux system, you may have seen duplicate files that end with a tilde (~). Such as having two files, notes.txt and notes.txt~, in the same directory.
I have found these to be quite annoying and have to manually remove them before I package up the files. I also didn’t know exactly where they came from until today.
Using the Linux terminal is a fantastic thing. It gives you access to hundreds of great commands and programs, can make navigating through complex directories quick and easy, and offers tools like tab auto-complete that make doing all this a breeze. However, there is a caveat for some people: Linux is case-sensitive. Personally, I love how Linux is case-sensitive, but I know that not everyone will agree with me.
There are ways to create case-insensitive partitions, but doing this has its own technical and functional limitations. If anyone is interested, drop me a line, and I’ll work on a post on this topic.
For those that don’t like how everything in Terminal is case-sensitive, there is a solution that will relieve some of the pain. You can configure your system to make tab auto-complete case-insensitive even on a case-sensitive file system.
I recently ran into an issue where a mounted SSHFS filesystem refused to unmount.
I tried to unmount it from inside Nautilus by right-clicking the mount and selecting Unmount, but this failed with an error message. The error told me that it couldn’t unmount the device and gave a reason of “mount disagrees with the fstab”.
I then edited the fstab (sudo vi /etc/fstab) and commented out the entry for the device. I tried to unmount in Nautilus again, but this time it told me that I couldn’t unmount the device because I wasn’t root and the device was not listed in fstab. I then uncommented the previously commented line and saved the file again.
Time to get dirty. I tried to manually run umount, but it failed:
[chris@home ~]$ sudo umount /mnt/share umount: /mnt/share: device is busy. (In some cases useful info about processes that use the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1)) [chris@home ~]$
This was getting personal now as the previous messages said nothing about the device being in use. I closed out every application and tried again. Same error message.
I followed the instructions and ran man lsof followed by man fuser to find out more about those recommended commands. fuser was the winner.
fuser allows you to find out detailed information about processes that are using specific files or sockets. In addition to getting information, it allows you to kill processes accessing the file or socket. This was exactly what I was looking for.
After reading up on the fuser syntax, I ran the following:
[chris@home ~]$ sudo fuser -km /mnt/share /mnt/share/: 9004c [chris@home ~]$
This command basically translates into “find every process that is accessing the /mnt/share mount point and kill it”. Since I was unsure of the ownership of the processes that would be killed, I ran it with sudo to make sure that any processes could be killed.
The /mnt/share/: 9004c response means that a process with an ID of 9004 was terminated.
Again, I ran:
[chris@home ~]$ sudo umount /mnt/share [chris@home ~]$
This command cheerily replied with nothing, which is a good sign as it means that the umount command succeeded.
Finally, the mount is unmounted. Now if only I could remember what I was trying to do when this problem happened…
A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.
I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:
Last night I needed to modify one of my partitions from inside Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10). I quickly realized that the familiar Partition Editor was nowhere to be found. I was quite stumped and looked through all the menus and didn’t find it. There is a simple reason for why I didn’t find it, it’s no longer installed by default on newer Ubuntu releases.
Fortunately, adding the Partition Editor, its true name is GParted, is extremely easy with package management.
Now that GParted is installed, you can access it via System > Administration > Partition Editor.
Happy partitioning.
Here’s a quick tip on storing a number of files into a single archive file quickly and easily in Ubuntu. The instructions will also work for those who use other distros as long as they are using Gnome and Nautilus.
Depending on the size of the files that you’ve selected, you’ll soon have a new zip file sitting in the folder where the source files are located.
Yesterday, I talked about how to get the most out of running regular expressions in PHP. The reason that I needed to dig in deep on regular expression syntax with PHP is because I needed to write some regular expressions that deal with Unicode characters.
After much reading, I believed that I knew everything that I needed. I started writing some regex strings and testing the code. Unfortunately, every time I ran a test with a string that contained Unicode characters, the match failed. When I removed the Unicode characters from the string and tested again, it would work. I was baffled.
A number of updates were installed on my machine yesterday. Ubuntu asked me to reboot, but I was busy, so I never ended up doing that yesterday. This morning, I booted my machine and was very surprised to find out that my headphone jacks no longer worked. Needless to say, I was upset.
As I discussed in a previous post, I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on a Dell Studio 17 laptop and getting the headphones to work required some workarounds. Basically, you had to set up the headphones to be line outs which caused one of the jacks to function but failed to mute the speakers when headphones were plugged in. This resulted in needing to manually mute and unmute the Front audio channel when you used or removed headphones. It’s because of this workaround that I thought the jack no longer worked.
I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
Don’t you hate when you need to know and exact model of a specific hardware component but don’t want to open up the machine or find the original documentation on it? Never fear, Linux has you covered.
There are a variety of ways to find out what kind of hardware you’re running, but one of the easiest ways that gives you large amounts of valuable data is to use lshw (Hardware Lister). I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and lshw is installed by default. You can test if you have lshw installed on you system by running the following command:
[chris@home ~]$ sudo lshw
If you get a large listing spewed out on your terminal, you’re good to go. Skip down to the Using lshw section. If you run the lshw command and get a “bash: lshw: command not found” error, you should be able to install lshw using your system’s package manager easily.
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