Category: Command Line

Learn About Your Wireless Connection

Many of us rely on a wireless connection for our connectivity and this is for those who want to learn about your wireless connection. It should be a relatively simple article. Though, if you do not use wireless internet this won’t be very interesting.

Today’s article about your wireless connection will show you how to learn things like the quality of your connection, the transmission power, the frequency you’re using, and other sundry wireless bits. It’s a bit technical, and we will learn about your wireless connection in the terminal, but it’s all good information and not very complicated.

The tools we’ll be using should be installed in all current major distros. For example, we won’t use ifconfig because it is deprecated. We’ll be using the ip command instead. We’ll also be using iwconfig in this article. You shouldn’t need to install anything for this article. All the tools you need should be installed by default.

Side note: The site sure does load fast without ads! I’ll be finding a new ad provider soon enough, I just haven’t done so yet. I may appeal to Google. We shall see, but the site sure is fast! Alas, it generates no income to offset my expenses. So, we will have ads again. It’s going to happen.

As for the tools we’ll be using…

The IP Command:

The first tool we’ll use will be the ip command. As I mentioned above, the ifconfig tool has been deprecated. It is no longer supported and we’ve moved on to bigger and better things. Most major distros will have made this change. For a bit of completeness sake, I’ll include details for the old way.

You can verify that the ip command is available with this command:

If you check the man page, with man ip command, you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. The job is what was indicated in the article’s title. Anyhow, the ip command is described like this:

ip – show / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels

We’ll be using the command to identify the name of your wireless connection. It’s easy enough and you can easily follow along.

The IWCONFIG Command:

The iwconfig command is how we’ll be gathering information about your wireless connection. You should find that you don’t have to install anything for this. If you’re using a major distro that’s modern, you’ll almost certainly have iwconfig available. You can confirm that iwconfig is available with this command:

Just like we did above, you can run the man iwconfig command to see that this is the tool for the job. The output should include the following:

In our case, we won’t be doing any configuration – but we will be using this command to learn about the wireless connection. It’s a handy tool, but we’ll just be using it to gather data.

So, let’s get into the actual article itself…

Learn About Your Wireless Connection:

I mentioned above that this is something you do in the terminal. You probably know how to open your terminal by now. If not, you can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open up your default terminal.

With your terminal now open, you can check your network connections. The purpose of this command is to learn which of your connection names is the correct one for your wireless connection.

If you’re using an older system, and some modern systems still contain the command, you can use the deprecated ifconfig like so:

Scroll through that data to find your wireless connection. It’ll begin with a W. It used to have a nice simple name by default, but times have changed. In my case, it looks like this:

In this case, you can see that the name of my wireless device is wlxe4beed0e5f5c. Unless you’ve renamed them, your wireless connection should start with a W and should be the only connection that starts with a W.

With that information in hand, you’ll next want to learn about your wireless connection with the iwconfig command. The syntax is quite simple:

So, in my case, the command would look like this:

The output would look like this (in my case):

From there, you can see the access point you’re connected to. You can find out the bit rate, frequency, and power management status of the device, and much more. See? Pretty easy.

HINT: If you don’t want all that information, you can always pipe it through grep. That’s pretty simple:

An example output would be:

This is a quick and easy way to learn about your wireless connection. It’s something that’s not too difficult and something everyone can practice to get a little bit more comfortable working in the Linux terminal.

Closure:

Someone asked if I was running out of ideas for articles. I do not believe I am. There’s just so much to write about and so many things that are worth covering. Today we’re learning about your wireless connection. Tomorrow we’ll be on to something else. And that’s okay… 

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Test Your Storage Drive’s Read Speed

One of the most frequent things you’ll do is read data from disk, so why not test your storage drive’s read speed? In this article, we’ll use an application we’ve used before. This shouldn’t be a very complicated article.

We store data on drives, or disks if you prefer. Most of us don’t use disks as our main storage devices. We do use disks for backups or storing large amounts of data, but we largely use SSDs these days. Some of us even use NVMe M.2 SSDs to store our data. The latter is currently the quickest you’re likely to encounter as a consumer.

The old spinning platters we used (though we’ve used lots of forms of magnetic storage) are typically referred to as HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). The SSDs (Solid State Drives) have no moving parts and are much faster. The NVMe M.2 SSDs are faster still.

If you’re suffering from some bottleneck, you might want to diagnose that. You might just be curious. It is also possible that you just purchased new hardware and want to see if the storage device reaches the advertised speed.

The tool we’ll be using is hdparm. This works fine with USB thumb drives, HDDs, regular SSDs, and even NVMe SSDs. It’s a complex application with a lot of options. I’ve covered some features before.

How To: Show Your Hard Drive Specifications In The Terminal

So then, let’s learn about this hdparm…

hdparm:

It should be noted that this hdparm application should be installed by default. It should also be mentioned that hdparm is a terminal-based application. You can verify that hdparm is installed with the following command:

If you then check the man page (with man hdparm) you’ll see that hdparm is described quite nicely like this:

hdparm – get/set SATA/IDE device parameters

If hdparm is not installed, you can surely find it in your package manager. 

As you can see, hdparm is the right tool for the job assuming you want to test your storage drive’s read speed. It’s also the right tool for a bunch of other jobs, but we’ll just be covering the read speed today.

Test Your Storage Drive’s Read Speed:

As I mentioned above, this hdparm application is something you use in your terminal. I suspect my regular readers will have guessed that. If you’re new to the terminal, more often than not you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal open, let’s identify your storage drives with this command:

You’re interested in the bits that start with /dev/<drive_ID> as those are the drives you’ll be able to test. 

NOTE: You should run these tests several times and average them, and you should do so while the system is otherwise idle. That will give you the peak results.

We’re interested in two flags, as they represent two tests. The -t flag tests the read cached. The -T flag tests the drive’s buffered read timings. You’ll often find the first test is fairly similar throughout the different drives and that the cached test shows the most differences. If those two terms, cached and buffered, confuse you, here’s a link about the differences between cache and buffer as far as the hdparm application goes.

You’ll need elevated permissions for this, so the command looks like this:

Or, as an example for many of you, the command might look like this:

That command will test both the cached read speed and the buffered read speed. These tests are important because you’re using a smart operating system that puts things into the cache and buffer that are likely to be read from the drive. So, the command listed will test both. You can split them up of course.

I decided to get you some examples:

Some Quick Read Speed Tests:

This is the internal SSD on a desktop:

Next is a USB 2.0 device plugged into that desktop:

Then we have an external HDD plugged into a USB 2.0 port on that desktop:

For comparison, this is an NVMe M.2 SSD:

As you can see, the internal SSD is quite fast. The thumb drive is the next quickest. This is followed by the external drive that’s just a spinning platter drive. 

Then, of course, you can see that the NVMe M.2 SSD is so much faster. That’s not even the fastest SSD out there. There are faster NVMe M.2 SSDs that don’t cost a lot of money. The prices have come down these days. You can even get a PCIe card that lets you mount an NVMe M.2 SSD if your motherboard doesn’t already support it.

Closure:

Should you want to get some drive benchmarks, you can certainly use hdparm to test your storage drive’s read speed. This isn’t something complicated and most anyone can figure it out. All you need to do is follow the directions carefully and in order. I do try to explain things as I go along.

There’s a lot more to the hdparm application. I encourage you to check the man page. There are probably another half-dozen articles that can be written about hdparm, so you’ll likely see this application again in the future. I doubt I’ll do another one too soon, as I like to space things out and not get too repetitive. 

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Yet Another Way To Check Filesystem Space Use

Many tools do the same thing in Linux and this is just another way to check filesystem space use. This one isn’t all that special, it’s just another way. If you want to check your filesystem usage (basically, how much free space you have used on your storage devices) this article can help you with that.

This shouldn’t be a long article. I’ve written others on the topic. It’s safe to assume that you know what a filesystem is. It’s the system your hardware uses to store data if you don’t know. There are many types, from Ext3 to ExFAT. They are all filesystems used to store data.

It should go without saying that you can fill up your storage space and might want to know how much space you have available. Well, if you want to find that information, this is an article for you!

This is another application. There are others.

Monitor Disk Usage With GDU
Show Disk Usage With ‘ncdu’
How To: Check Disk Usage With ‘df’

Those are just a few applications that will let you monitor your filesystem’s usage. I’m sure I’ve covered others.

This pydf is a Python script, but we’ll be using Lubunt and installing pydf just like we’d install any other application, albeit in the terminal. I will point out that pydf has a colored output, which is nice.

I can’t say that this pydf is available in other distros, but it’s available in Lubuntu. As Lubuntu is Ubuntu, that means it’s available in Ubuntu. It is also likely available in Debian. I think you’ll find that pydf is also available in the downstream distros like Linux Mint. I did provide a link above that will take you to the project page.

Check Filesystem Space Usage:

As I’ve done the work in Lubuntu, these directions will be for Lubuntu. You can adapt them easily. In Lubuntu, you can open the terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard. That will open the default terminal.

With your terminal now open, you can install pydf with the following command:

If you want to check the man page (say with man pydf), you’ll find that there isn’t one. If you’d like to view the pydf’s help file, try this command:

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see that using pydf is quite simple. If you just want to run the program to check filesystem space use, then just run it in the terminal like so:

If you want the output in ‘human-readable’ format, you can add a -h flag where bits are divided by 1024, or -H which means bits are divided by 1000. The choice is up to you.

Likewise, if you want to see even the zero-byte filesystems (the special filesystems that you don’t work directly with), you’d run this command:

Additionally, there’s a -l flag that limits the output to just the local filesystems. If I combine them for my preferred output, I get this:

Here’s an example output:

As you can see, there are a bunch of loop devices which are Snaps, which is perfectly normal for many Ubuntu-based systems. You can also see that I’ve used slightly more than half of my drive space and clever observers would notice that the drive is an NVMe SSD.

Closure:

So, that was a quick and easy article about how you can check filesystem space use, specifically in Lubuntu but easily applied to other distros. There are many ways to accomplish this task in Linux, which means this is just one among many such tools. It shouldn’t take too long to learn how to use pydf if that’s the tool you want to use.

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Get Your NVMe SSD Information

If you’re using a modern computer, you might be using an NVMe SSD and you might want to know your NVMe information. The standard and older tools may not be all that helpful, even though NVMe SSDs have been around for a while. This article will help you with that, should you want to get your NVMe SSD information.

Let me see if I can explain this…

You’ll often see “NVMe M.2 SSD”, which is a mouthful.

NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express which is just a specification.

M.2 is another specification for expansion cards.

The device that is used for NVMe is an SSD – Solid State Drive.

SSD, which has been around for quite a while now, differs from previous generations of storage in that it’s electronic and not magnetic. 

We humans have a long history of trying to record things. We’ve used everything from words to pictures, from dots on paper to grooves on wire, from symbols to magnetic, and more…

For computers, a long time was in the magnetic storage age. From spinning drums holding mere bytes of data to complicated spinning platters that hold terabytes of data… We’ve made good use of the magnetic storage mediums over the years.

Solid-state drives don’t use magnets. Data is stored on memory chips that retain their memory (non-volatile) even if the power is disconnected. An SSD is quite common today.

Less common, but growing in popularity, is the NVMe M.2 SSD. This is a much smaller format than the early SSDs (which even came in the 3.5″ format, and surely some obscure formats that I’m overlooking). This is also on a faster bus lane, meaning the read and write speeds far exceed the storage medium before it – including the aforementioned larger SSDs that connect via IDE or (preferably) SATA.

The current consumer options are pretty great and an NVMe SSD is much faster than a regular SSD. The standard SATA SSD is quite common still, while the NVMe M.2 SSD is the latest and greatest.

With me so far?

Well, an NVMe M.2 SSD is a very different architecture and, as such, there are special tools to use. If you want to find the temperature of your NVMe SSD, the normal tools (like hdparm) may not yet work. Instead, there are other tools that you’d want to use.

In this article, we’ll be talking about a tool known as ‘nvme-cli’…

About nvme-cli:

You almost certainly don’t have nvme-cli installed by default. If you did, you’d be able to check the man page. Doing so would show that nvme-cli is described like this:

nvme – the NVMe storage command line interface utility (nvme-cli)

It should be important to know (and we’ll get to the installation step in just a minute) that you’ll be installing the package with one name but referring to, that is using, the application with another name.

For example, it’s man nvme to access the man page. 

NOTE: You will want to read the man page. There’s a whole lot of options and we’re just going to cover one basic command. We’ll learn stuff like the operating temperature of your NVMe. We won’t be worried about the various other options, of which there are many.

Find Your NVMe Information:

If you want to find your NVMe information in the terminal, you can do that. You’ll first need to install a tool known as nvme-cli. To do this, you’ll want an open terminal. You can usually open a terminal by just pressing CTRL + ALT + T. 

With your terminal now open, you must first install nvme-cli. You’ll find that packages are available for many distros, as they should be as the format is becoming more and more popular. 

Follow one of the basic installation methods below, specifically the one suitable for your distro’s package management system.

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

SUSE/OpenSUSE/etc:

Fedora/Asahi/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc (those with yum available still):

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

I’m pretty sure there’s an nvme-cli package available for all the major Linux distros. If not, I linked to the project page above and you can check there for a package or to compile nvme-cli from source.

Find Your NVMe’s Absolute Path:

You’re going to need the absolute path to where your drive is mounted. That’s a part of the command, so you’ll need that. Just to mix things up a little bit, we’ll use the ‘df’ command. You should have df installed automatically on any major distro. The man page will helpfully describe the df application like so:

df – report file system disk space usage

We don’t care about all that. We just care about the absolute path. This usually starts with /dev/ and ends with the device ID. In an NVMe’s case, it will usually include nvme in the title, which is quite helpful.

So, let’s get that information…

You’ll get an output similar to this one:

It should be obvious that the absolute path for this would be /dev/nvme0n1p1 and that’s the data we’re going to need.

Now, to find your NVMe information, the syntax would be like so:

Using the output from above, an example of that would be:

This will then give you an output like so:

nvme status in the terminanl
There you go, you now have your NVMe Information. It’s not too difficult to do.

Of course, you can pipe this output to other commands. Let’s say you wanted to know the current temperature of your NVMe SSD. You’d do that with the grep command. An example would be:

If you want to know the number of times you’ve powered the device on, you can do that by piping the output to grep again. For example:

So, you can use the nvme-cli application (the nvme command) for quite a bit. You can do a whole lot more with it, so be sure to check the man page if you’re interested in doing more than checking the temperature or how many times you’ve cycled the power on that device.

As NVMe SSDs get more common, you’ll likely start seeing this package installed by default. From what I can see right now, no major distro is including this by default. If you’re using an NVMe M.2 SSD, you might just want to install it. If nothing else, it’s yet another tool that might come in handy.

Closure:

Today’s article is a bit longer than some but I think it’s worth reading. If I didn’t think it was worth reading, I wouldn’t have written as much! There’s so much that I could have covered but I didn’t. Articles have to have only so many words before people lose interest.

I’d have loved to cover the history of computer memory (or perhaps even more about how we humans have recorded stuff) but that didn’t seem prudent. I figured I’d limit the number of words to 1,200, but I still managed to exceed that – though not by too many. Seriously, it’s a pretty fascinating bit of history. You should use Google (and/or YouTube) to see learn about all the different ways we’ve stored data, and that’s just scratching the surface!

Fascinating stuff, I tell you! Fascinating!

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Monitor Disk Usage With GDU

I probably shouldn’t say ‘disk’ but I think we’ll all agree that we know what I mean and today we’ll monitor disk usage with ‘gdu’. It’ll be fun! It won’t even be all that complicated! Read on and learn how to monitor disk usage with gdu. It won’t hurt!

If you’re using your storage, you might want to monitor your disk usage. If you’re running low on disk space,  you might want to find out what’s using your disk space so that you can address that. Suffice it to say, that Linux is less than happy when you run low on disk space. Running out of disk space may even prevent system booting and you’ll have to go about it with a live instance, which nobody likes doing.

Oh, I’m sure I’ve covered this before. There are all sorts of tools you can use to monitor disk usage. Some are faster than others and gdu is not one of them. No, no… It’s not fast. But, it’s an option!

Speaking of options to monitor your disk usage, I’ve covered this before!

Show Disk Usage With ‘ncdu’
How To: Check Disk Usage With ‘df’
A Few Ways To Visualize Disk Usage In Linux
How To: Find Large Files Using ‘ncdu’

You might ask yourself why I’m covering this again. The answer is that I like to give you choices. The goal is to bring you up to speed, making you more efficient with your Linux usage. I want to make Linux more approachable for the novice (while still sharing stuff with the experienced users) and one of the ways to do that is to show you the variety of tools available. That way you can pick and choose among the choices. You can pick which works best for you.

In this case, we’ll be using an application known as GDU.

More On GDU:

The tool we’ll be using is known as ‘gdu‘. I’ll explain how to install gdu in Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu or Linux Mint), but you can find packages to install gdu easily. It’s easy to install, trust me.

I assume ‘gdu’ stands for ‘Go disk usage’, with ‘Go’ referring to the programming language and not for a space on a Monopoly board. It is a supposition because the man page and repository say nothing on the matter.

Once you do have gdu installed, you’ll be able to check the man page. Doing so will show you that gdu is described like so:

I might argue the ‘pretty fast’ bit but I’m too lazy to compare and provide actual data. It took quite a while when I ran the application with instructions to scan my entire system (complete with external drives). I got distracted but this is a timed output:

I don’t think it’s all that speedy – but it’s neat. So, there’s that. Which is nice.

Still, it’s the correct tool for the job. Well, it’s a correct tool for the job. As you can see from the links above, there are many correct tools for the job. This is just one of them.

So then, let’s get this installed and use it…

Monitor Disk Usage With GDU:

You know it’s true. This application is terminal-based so you’ll need an open terminal. As I’m writing this for Debian distributions, you can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T to open up your default terminal.

Your command will differ if you’re not using apt. If you’re using apt, you can install gdu with this command:

When you’ve installed gdu, you can navigate to a directory and run the command like this:

You can also run gdu with a specified directory.

An example output would look like this:

Checking disk space with gdu...
This is gdu in the terminal. You can probably figure it out from here. Yes, I have weird stuff.

You use your arrow keys to navigate. If you have any questions, press the question mark. There’s nothing advanced to it. If you wish to exit gdu, press CTRL + C and gdu will terminate properly.

Closure:

There you have it. You’re now using gdu to monitor disk usage. Well, you’re doing so in Debian-based distros. You’ll have to figure it out for your distro but they have packages and binary files available for others. It’s a pretty handy application, even though it’s not all that speedy.

Granted, as far as speed goes, I didn’t compare it with other applications. It doesn’t seem to be all that quick, but it does do the job as intended. It’s a handy way to visualize disk usage in the terminal and a tool worth testing.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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