linux

Any command executed in Bash or any other Linux shell, has one input stream (stdin) and two kinds of output streams: standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr).

Each of these streams is represented by a numeric file descriptor:

• 0 – stdin, the standard input stream
• 1 – stdout, the standard output stream
• 2 – stderr, the standard error stream

There is an advantage in separating the stdout and stderr streams, as it allows to redirect/pipe a command’s output (stdout) to a file or anther command and still see any error messages (stderr) in the terminal.

But sometimes it is required to redirect the stderr stream to stdout or redirect the both stderr and stdout to a file or to /dev/null and in this note i am showing how to do this. (more…)

If you try to download a file over HTTP/HTTPS provided by a dynamic link or through a chain of 301, 302 redirects, wget would normally save the file using a part of the URL that you’re using.

At the same time, if you use this URL to download the file in a browser, it will be downloaded and saved with its original name.

In this note i will show how to force wget to preserve the original filename and save it with its actual name. (more…)

If your Linux user’s password is about to expire, you may see a message as follows on your login screen:

Warning: Your password will expire in X days

In this note i will show how to disable the Linux user’s password expiration from the command line using the chage command. (more…)

Telegram Desktop can be installed on Ubuntu/Linux Mint from the Ubuntu’s APT repository, but this way you will get a quite outdated version of the app.

Alternatively, you can install the latest version of the Telegram Desktop app using a Snap package manager, but it is disable in Linux Mint and there are some reasons for this (one, two).

This note shows how to install the latest version of the Telegram Desktop application on any Linux distribution, incl. Ubuntu and Linux Mint, from the official tsetup.*.tar.xz tarball and how to update the already installed application. (more…)

The main edition of the Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which itself is based on Debian.

If you try to add an Ubuntu APT repository in the Linux Mint with the command, like sudo apt-add-repository "deb [arch=amd64] <URL> $(lsb_release -cs) main", you may get this error:

E: The repository ‘<URL> <codeName> Release’ does not have a Release file. N: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default. N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

This is because the $(lsb_release -cs) command returns not the codename of the Ubuntu release but the codename of the Linux Mint.

To solve this error in the most cases it should be enough to replace the $(lsb_release -cs) with the Ubuntu version the Linux Mint distribution is based on.

In this note i will show how to find the Ubuntu version the Linux Mint is based on. (more…)

If you search for how to split screen in a Linux Mint/Ubuntu you will find very fast that this can be done by using the different combinations of the ⊞ Win + ←, →, ↑, ↓ key buttons.

But if you are a lucky owner of the MATE edition of the Linux Mint, you will notice that these split-screen keyboard shortcuts don’t work out of the box.

This is because for some reason the split-screen keyboard shortcuts in the MATE edition of the Linux Mint are disabled by default.

This note shows how to split screen in the MATE edition of the Linux Mint. (more…)

While working in a Linux terminal, sometimes you may want to open the current directory in a GUI file manager and continue working from there.

There are many different file managers in Linux, but there is also a universal way to open the default file manager from the terminal using the xdg-open command.

This note shows how to open the file manager from the terminal in Linux. (more…)