Linux – Page 5 – Ryan Chapin's Website

Count The Number of Characters In a Field With awk

Posted on May 12, 2014March 28, 2021 by rchapin

A quick one-liner for counting the number of characters in a given field for each line in an ASCII file.

for i in `cat source.txt`; do echo $i | awk  {'print length($1)}' >> counts.txt

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Restarting XServer in Fedora 20

Posted on March 24, 2014March 31, 2021 by rchapin

I was having problems logging in this morning to my laptop. When I entered my password, it just hung. I pressed Ctrl-f2 to switch to an alternate tty, logged in as root and checked for errors in /var/log/messages.

Not seeing anything, I figured, I’d try and restart the Xserver. Still not being completely familiar with the sysctl paradigm it wasn’t obvious how to restart it.

So, as root, I simply switched the runlevel to 3, and then back to 5 → Continue reading “Restarting XServer in Fedora 20”

Creating a Beep from a Command Line or Shell Script

Posted on February 3, 2014November 25, 2021 by rchapin

If you have a long-running command on shell-script that you want to generate a beep upon completion on your PC running Linux do the following:

Make sure that the pcspkr module is loaded:

# modprobe pcspkr

Then create a wrapper shell script that looks something like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Some long running command here . . .

echo -e '\a' /dev/console

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Disabling Window Snapping for Fedora Core 20 Under Xfce

Posted on January 28, 2014November 25, 2021 by rchapin

For me, window snapping is incredibly annoying.

For FC 20 with the Xfce spin, there a couple of knobs to turn before it can be turned off completely:

Applications Menu/Settings/Window Manager:

Go to the Advanced tab and uncheck ‘Snap windows to screen border’ and ‘Snap windows to other windows’

Applications Menu/Settings/Window Manager Tweaks:

Go to Accessibility tabUncheck the ‘Use edge resistance instead of window snapping’→ Continue reading “Disabling Window Snapping for Fedora Core 20 Under Xfce”