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How to sync time on Linux servers with Chrony  Dmartpreneur

How to sync time on Linux servers with Chrony  TechRepublic

While the cutoff of new feature work to queue in DRM-Next for the next kernel cycle usually ends around the "-rc6" time of the current cycle, AMD has submitted a few last minute items for Linux 5.20 ahead of its merge window opening next week...

OS-Climate Unleashes Power of Open Source to Develop Data and Tools Required to Meet the Paris Climate Goals  PR Newswire

Hobo Cat Adventures features dark humour and souls-like combat - now on Linux  GamingOnLinux

Hobo Cat Adventures features dark humour and souls-like combat - now on Linux  GamingOnLinux

Fedora ditches 'No Rights Reserved' software over patent concerns  BleepingComputer

VRChat adds Easy Anti-Cheat, community not happy but Linux and Steam Deck work fine  GamingOnLinux

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards...

Increased Use Of Windows BitLocker Is Causing Headaches For Linux Dual Booting  Phoronix

Increase use of Windows BitLocker for full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 is causing more challenges by Linux distributions for supporting convenient dual boot functionality for those wishing to keep both Windows and Linux on the same systems...

In addition to new kernel code and updated firmware fixing a power management issue for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" where C1 and C1E power states were mutually exclusive, another important Sapphire Rapids power management improvement is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel cycle...

New Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” Kernel Security Update Fixes 9 Vulnerabilities  9to5Linux

Pop!_OS 22.04 Linux Distro is Finally Adding Raspberry Pi 4 Support  It's FOSS News

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...

Open-Source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Driver Refactors Some Display Code For Linux 5.20  Phoronix

LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like the Clang compiler are now under a feature freeze and branched from the main code-base ahead of the stable 15.0 release in September...

6 Tips and Tools to Enhance Your Flatpak Experience in Linux  It's FOSS

6 Tips and Tools to Enhance Your Flatpak Experience in Linux  It's FOSS

How I manage files from the Linux command line Jim Hall Wed, 07/27/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

Managing files in a graphical desktop like GNOME or KDE is an exercise in point-and-click. To move a file into a folder, you click and drag the icon to its new home. To remove a file, you drag it into the “Trash” icon. The graphical interface makes desktop computing easy to use.

But we don't always interact with Linux systems with a graphical interface. If you work on a server, you likely need to use the command line to get around. Even desktop users like me might prefer to interact with their system through a terminal and command line. I tend to rely on a few commands to manage my files from the command line:

List files with Linux ls

For anyone who uses the command line, you can't get far without seeing what's there. The ls command lists the contents of a directory. For example, to look at what's in a web server's document root in /var/www/html, you can type:

ls /var/www/html

Most of the time, I use ls to look at the directory I'm in. To do that, just type ls to list everything. For example, when I'm in the root directory of my web project, I might see this:

$ ls about fontawesome fonts index.php styles docs fontawesome.zip images prism

The ls command has about 60 command line options that can list files and directories in all kinds of ways. One useful option is -l to provide a long or detailed listing, including permissions, file size, and owner:

$ ls -l total 6252 drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 22 16:18 about drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 25 16:35 docs drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 7 00:00 fontawesome -rw-r--r--. 1 jhall jhall 6365962 Jun 2 16:26 fontawesome.zip drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 22 16:17 fonts drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 25 13:03 images -rw-rw-r--. 1 jhall jhall 327 Jun 22 16:38 index.php drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 22 16:18 prism drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4096 Jun 22 16:17 styles

File sizes are shown in bytes, which may not be useful if you are looking at very large files. To see file sizes in a format that is helpful to humans, add the -h or --human-readable option to print sizes with G for Gigabyte, M for Megabyte, and K for Kilobyte:

$ ls -l --human-readable total 6.2M drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 22 16:18 about drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 25 16:35 docs drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 7 00:00 fontawesome -rw-r--r--. 1 jhall jhall 6.1M Jun 2 16:26 fontawesome.zip drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 22 16:17 fonts drwxr-xr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 25 13:03 images -rw-rw-r--. 1 jhall jhall 327 Jun 22 16:38 index.php drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 22 16:18 prism drwxrwxr-x. 2 jhall jhall 4.0K Jun 22 16:17 styles

Rather than 6365962 for the file size, ls now displays the zip file as 6.1M or just over 6 MB in size.

View files with Linux cat, head, and tail

The next step after listing files is examining what each file contains. For that, I use a few commands. Starting with the docs directory on my web server:

$ ls docs chapter1.tex chapter4.tex chapter7.tex lorem.txt chapter2.tex chapter5.tex chapter8.tex readme.txt chapter3.tex chapter6.tex chapter9.tex workbook.tex

What are these files? Fortunately, this directory has a readme.txt file, which I might assume contains a description of the files in this project directory. If the file is not too long, I can view it using the cat command:

$ cat docs/readme.txt This is the workbook for the C programming self-paced video series. The main file is the workbook.tex file, which includes the other chapters.

If a file is very long, I can look at just the first few lines using the head command. This displays a certain number of lines from the file, usually the first 10 lines unless you tell head otherwise with the -n or --lines option. For example, these two versions of the head command examine the first three lines of the lorem.txt file:

$ head -n 3 docs/lorem.txt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam at ligula eget nunc feugiat pharetra. Nullam nec vulputate augue. Suspendisse tincidunt aliquet $ head --lines=3 docs/lorem.txt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam at ligula eget nunc feugiat pharetra. Nullam nec vulputate augue. Suspendisse tincidunt aliquet

If I instead wanted to see the last few lines of a file, I can use the tail command in the same way. Again, these two tail commands each show the last three lines of the lorem.txt file:

$ tail -n 3 docs/lorem.txt egestas sodales. Vivamus tincidunt ex sed tellus tincidunt varius. Nunc commodo volutpat risus, vitae luctus lacus malesuada tempor. Nulla facilisi. $ tail --lines=3 docs/lorem.txt egestas sodales. Vivamus tincidunt ex sed tellus tincidunt varius. Nunc commodo volutpat risus, vitae luctus lacus malesuada tempor. Nulla facilisi.

Using head and tail are also useful when examining log files on a server. I have a small web server I run on my at-home network to test websites before I make them live. I recently discovered that the web server's log is quite long, and I wondered how old it was. Using head, I printed just the first line to see that the log file was created in December 2020:

$ ls -l --human-readable /var/log/httpd total 13M -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 13M Jun 25 16:23 access_log -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 45K Jun 2 00:00 error_log $ sudo head -n 1 /var/log/httpd/access_log 10.0.0.177 - - [05/Dec/2020:14:58:35 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 5564 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36"

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles

[ Related read: Getting started with the Linux cat command ]

Delete files with Linux rm

In my directory with the sample text files, the lorem.txt file contains Lorem Ipsum text. This is just dummy text used in the printing industry, so the lorem.txt file doesn't really belong in this project. Let's delete it. The rm command removes a file like this:

$ ls docs chapter1.tex chapter4.tex chapter7.tex lorem.txt chapter2.tex chapter5.tex chapter8.tex readme.txt chapter3.tex chapter6.tex chapter9.tex workbook.tex $ rm docs/lorem.txt $ ls docs chapter1.tex chapter4.tex chapter7.tex readme.txt chapter2.tex chapter5.tex chapter8.tex workbook.tex chapter3.tex chapter6.tex chapter9.tex

The rm command is dangerous, because it removes a file without the intervention of a trash or recycle bin. It's much safer to install a trash command, such as trashy or trash-cli. Then you can send files to a staging area before deleting them forever:

$ rm docs/lorem.txt

Managing files on the command line requires only a few commands. The ls command lists the contents of a directory, and cat, head and tail show the contents of files. Use rm or a safe "trash" command to remove files you don't need. These five commands will help you manage your files on any Linux system. To learn more, including the options available, use the --help option to see a summary of how to use each command, such as ls --help to see how to use the ls command.

If you prefer to interact with your system through the terminal, check out my favorite Linux commands for managing files.

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