Shell Archives - FAQforge

How to clear Bash history on Linux

April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 by Till Brehm

The bash history is a log file that contains all commands that the user executed on the Linux shell. When you use the "arrow up" key on our keyboard, then Bash will look up the previous command from that file and display it on the screen, ready to be executed again. Bash history file location The ... Read more

How to set a VNC password

April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 by Till Brehm

The Linux TigerVNC Server provides a command to set a new password. Set VNC Password The command is "vncpasswd", the password is stored in encrypted form into the file ~/.vnc/passwd of the home directory of the user. Run: vncpasswd to set a new password for the currently logged-in user. The command will then prompt for the ... Read more

How to convert filenames or text to lowercase on the Linux command line

April 16, 2021April 16, 2021 by Till Brehm

There is no simple 'tolower' command on the bash, but you can convert uppercase characters to lowercase with a little shell script. The script uses the tr command internally for converting the chars. Create a shell script with the name 'tolower' that converts all text that is given as a command-line argument to lower case: ... Read more

How to convert a PNG file to JPG on Linux

by Till Brehm

Convert a PNG file to JPEG format on Ubuntu

JPEG is a lossy compression file format for digital images. It can greatly reduce the space used by a graphics file in comparison to the PNG format. This tutorial describes how to convert a PNG file to JPG on the shell. I will use the command line tool GraphicsMagick for this on my Ubuntu 18.04 system, ... Read more

How can I download an entire website?

by Till Brehm

Sometimes you might want to download an entire website e.g. to archive it or read it offline. This tutorial will show you which application can be used on Windows and Linux.

Copy files on Linux shell that have been modified or added within the last X minutes

by Till Brehm

Here is a short script that helped me to copy files that have ben modified within the last 60 minutes to a new directory. The script uses a combination of the find and cp commands, it has to be run inside the directory that contains the new files. In this example, I will copy all ... Read more

Get the name of the newest file in a directory on the linux shell

by Till Brehm

If you have a directory with many files (a few thousand in my case) and need to know which one is the newest, then the following command might be useful. It returns the name and details of the newest file in a directory where it is executed: ls -tl | sed -n 2p

Disable quota for a Linux user or group on the shell

by Till Brehm

Linux user quotas can be edited with the commands edquota or setquota on the shell. While edquota opens the quota settings in a editor like vim, setquota allows you to specify the quota settings on the commandline. Example for disabling the quota for the user "testuser": setquota -u testuser 0 0 0 0 -a Example ... Read more

Rerun the last command with sudo on the Linux shell

by Till Brehm

Have you ever executed a command on the shell and noticed the that you had to run it with sudo? Instead of typing the command again with "sudo" in front of it, just run: sudo !! which will execute the command that was run before with sudo. Thanks to Planetfox for this tipp.