Why does Ctrl-D (EOF) exit the shell?
Are you literally “ending a file” by inputting this escape sequence, i.e. is the interactive shell session is seen as a real file stream by the shell, like any other file stream? If so, which file?
shell
Going into a directory linked by a link
When I cd a link, my current path is prefixed with the link’s path, rather than the path of the directory the link links to.
E.g.
Is this a typo in Bash manual’s redirection section?
The use of the word duplication seems a little strange to me in
this context. Perhaps that is throwing me.
Why does the command shuf file > file leave an empty file, but similar commands do not?
3.1.1 Shell Operation
make my zsh prompt show mode in vi mode
I use bindkey -v (for bash-ers set -o vi I think that works in zsh too) or vi(m) mode. but it bugs me that I don’t have any visual cue to tell me whether I’m in insert mode or command mode. Does anyone know how I can make my prompt display the mode?
unix test when to use eq vs = vs == in test commands?
When should I use -eq vs = vs ==
How to “correctly” start an application from a shell
I find it hard to phrase the question precisely but I will give my best. I use dwm as my default window manager and dmenu as my application launcher. I hardly use GUI applications aside from my browser. Most of my work is done directly from the command line. Furthermore, I’m a great fan of minimalism regarding operating systems, applications etc. One of the tools I never got rid of was an application launcher. Mainly because I lack a precise understanding of how application launchers work/what they do. Even extensive internet search only shows up vague explanation. What I want to do is get rid even of my application launcher because apart from actually spawning the application I have absolutely no use for it. In order to do this I would really like to know how to “correctly” start applications from the shell. Whereby the meaning of “correctly” can be approximated by “like an application launcher would do”. I do not claim that all application launchers work the same way because I do not understand them well enough.
understand a sequence of redirections
If several redirections are used together, does changing their order make difference?
Converting relative path to absolute path without symbolic link
Is there a Unix command to get the absolute (and canonicalized) path from a relative path which may contain symbolic links?
Is there a way to set the size of the history list in bash to more than 5000 lines?
No matter how much I set the HISTSIZE environment variable to be larger than 5000, when printing the history list with the history builtin, it prints only the last 5000 commands.
I need that because I often have a large .bash_history which exceeds 5000 lines, and sometimes one needs to address an early command by pressing Ctrl-R, but if that command is more than 5000 commands earlier, I can’t access it using that mechanism. I know I can use grep on the .bash_history, but I think the Ctrl-R mechanism would be much more faster (and convenient). I use gnu bash version 4.1.