Linux Fu: Supercharge Bash History

Having a history of shell commands is a great idea. It is, of course, enormously handy when you have to run something repetitively or you make a simple mistake that needs correction. However, as I’ve mentioned in the past, bash history isn’t without its problems. For one thing, by default, you don’t get history in one window from typing in another window. If you use a terminal multiplexer or a GUI, you are very likely to have many shells open. You can make them share history, but that comes with its own baggage. If you think about it, we have super fast computers with tons of storage compared to the “old days,” yet shell history is pretty much the same as it has been for decades. But [Rcaloras] did think about it and created Bashhub, a history database for bash, zsh, and probably some other shells, too.

Command detail screen

You might think you don’t need anything more than what you have, and, of course, you don’t. However, Bashhub offers privately stored and encrypted history across machines. It also provides context about commands you’ve executed in the past. In other words, you can see the directory you were in, the exact time and date, the system you were on, and the last return code of the command.

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Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory

Linux users have a lot of software to be proud of. However, there is the occasional Windows program that does something you’d really like to do and it just won’t run. This is especially true of low-level system programs. If you want to poke around your CPU and memory, for example, there are tons of programs for that under Windows. There are a few for Linux, but they aren’t always as complete or handy. Recently, I had half the memory in my main desktop fail and I wanted to poke around in the system. In particular, I wanted to read the information encoded in the memory chips configuration EEPROM. Should be easy, right? You’d think.

Not Really Easy

One nice tool a lot of Windows users have is CPU-Z. Of course, it doesn’t run on Linux, but there is a really nice imitator called CPU-X. You can probably install it from your repositories. However, the GitHub page is a nice stop if for no other reason than to enjoy the user name [TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]. The program has a gtk or an ncurses interface. You don’t need to run it as root, but if you press the “start daemon” button and authenticate, you can see some extra information, including a tab for memory.

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Linux Fu: Gum Up Your Script

We often write quick bash scripts and judging by the comments, half of us use bash or a similar shell to pop out quick, useful scripts, and half of us think that’s an abomination, and you should only use bash for your command line and resort to something more like a traditional language to do anything else. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably cursing your allegiance when you need to make your bash scripts more interactive.

Gum can help. It’s a utility that can handle your script input and output with a little flair while requiring almost no effort on your part.

The command looks simple, but it has twelve subcommands, each with myriad options. But you can break down the functions into a few simple categories. The input commands let you prompt for a line of input or a bunch of lines of input. You can also create a pick list or a yes/no type of prompt. There’s also a file picker and a filter, sort of like fzf.

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Linux Fu: Sharing Your Single WiFi

If you are trying to build a router or access point, you’ll need to dig into some of the details of networking that are normally hidden from you. But, for a normal WiFi connection, things mostly just work, even though that hasn’t always been the case. However, I ran into a special case the other day where I needed a little custom networking, and then I found a great answer to automate the whole process. It all comes down to hotel WiFi. How can you make your Linux laptop connect to a public WiFi spot and then rebroadcast it as a private WiFI network? In particular, I wanted to connect an older Chromecast to the network.

Hotel WiFi used to be expensive, but now, generally, it is free. There was a time when I carried a dedicated little box that could take a wired or wireless network and broadcast its own WiFi signal. These were actually fairly common, but you had to be careful as some would only broadcast a wired network connection. It was more difficult to make the wireless network share as a new wireless network, but some little travel routers could do it. Alternatively, you could install one of the open router firmware systems and set it up. But lately, I haven’t been carrying anything like that. With free WiFi, you can just connect your different devices directly to the network. But then there’s the Chromecast and the dreaded hotel login.

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Linux Fu: The Shell Forth Programmers Will Love

One of the most powerful features of Unix and Linux is that using traditional command line tools, everything is a stream of bytes. Granted, modern software has blurred this a bit, but at the command line, everything is text with certain loose conventions about what separates fields and records. This lets you do things like take a directory listing, sort it, remove the duplicates, and compare it to another directory listing. But what if the shell understood more data types other than streams? You might argue it would make some things better and some things worse, but you don’t have to guess, you can install cosh, a shell that provides tools to produce and work with structured data types.

The system is written with Rust, so you will need Rust setup to compile it. For most distributions, that’s just a package install (rust-all in Ubuntu-like distros, for example). Once you have it running, you’ll have a few new things to learn compared to other shells you’ve used. Continue reading “Linux Fu: The Shell Forth Programmers Will Love”

Linux Fu: UEFI Booting

Unless your computer is pretty old, it probably uses UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) to boot. The idea is that a bootloader picks up files from an EFI partition and uses them to start your operating system. If you use Windows, you get Windows. If you use Linux, there’s a good chance you’ll use Grub which may or may not show you a menu. The problem with Grub is you have to do a lot of configuration to get it to do different things. Granted, distros like Ubuntu have tools that go through and do much of the work for you and if you are satisfied with that, there’s no harm in using Grub to boot and manage multiple operating systems.

An alternative would be rEFInd, which is a nice modern UEFI boot manager. If you are still booting through normal (legacy) BIOS, the installation might be a hassle. But, in general, rEFInd, once installed, just automatically picks up most things, including Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and kernels. The biggest reasons you might change the configuration is if you want to hide some things you don’t care about or change the visual theme.

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Linux Fu: Miller The Killer Makes CSV No Pest

Historically, one of the nice things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file, and files are just sequences of characters. Of course, modern practice is that everything is not a file, and there is a proliferation of files with some imposed structure. However, if you’ve ever worked on old systems where your file access was by the block, you’ll appreciate the Unix-like files. Classic tools like awk, sed, and grep work with this idea. Files are just characters. But this sometimes has its problems. That’s the motivation behind a tool called Miller, and I think it deserves more attention because, for certain tasks, it is a lifesaver.

The Problem

Consider trying to process a comma-delimited file, known as a CSV file. There are a lot of variations to this type of file. Here’s one that defines two “columns.” I’ve deliberately used different line formats as a test, but most often, you get one format for the entire file:

Slot,String 
A,"Hello" 
"B",Howdy 
"C","Hello Hackaday" 
"D","""Madam, I'm Adam,"" he said." 
E 100,With some spaces!
X,"With a comma, or two, even"

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