How to ignore write errors while zeroing a disk?
Say you want to zero-out a failing hard disk. You want to overwrite as much as possible with zeros. What you don’t want is: the process aborts on the first write-error. How to do that?
Unix & Linux
What are the exact differences between awk and cut with grep?
We know that we can get the second column of the line we want from a file using these two techniques: awk '/WORD/ { print $2 }' filename or grep WORD filename| cut -f 2 -d ' ' My questions are: What are the differences between the two commands above? Which one has the best … Read more
How to automatically start and shut down VirtualBox machines?
I need to run a software system that is intended to be installed as an appliance on a dedicated machine. In order to save energy, I plan to run the system on a VirtualBox VM instead.
Highlight current mouse position
I’m running a dual-screen setup and have my trackpad disabled most of the time (which includes hiding the mousepointer).
When I reenable the trackpad (and display the mouse pointer again), I’ve lost track where the pointer was before.
How to find speed of WLAN interface?
I’m trying to find the speed of a network interface using a file descriptor. It’s easy to do it for ethX, just calling cat /sys/class/net/eth0/speed. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work with wireless interfaces. When I call /sys/class/net/wlan0/speed I get an error: invalid argument.
Cron job to delete files older than 3 days
I need to remove files older than 3 days with a cron job in 3 different directories. (these 3 directories are children of a parent directory /a/b/c/1 & /a/b/c/2 & /a/b/c/3) Can this be done with one line in the crontab?
How to convert floating point number to integer?
Is this the right way to do float to integer conversion in bash? Is there any other method?
Tiling windows in GNOME 2
How can I get tiling windows in GNOME?
How to start a second X session?
I tried to do it with the command startx 1. It seemed to flicker to a different screen momentarily, but then exited. Got the following error:
How do I pipe ls to grep, and delete the files filtered by grep?
I wanted to delete some package in my home file, but the filename was too long (google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb). So, I decided to use the command ls|grep chrome|rm to pipe the files to grep to filter out the chrome file, and then remove it. It didn’t work, so I would like to see how I can do this.