Category: Command Line

Make ‘wget’ Resume From An Interrupted Download

Today’s just going to be a quick article, an article where we learn how to make ‘wget’ resume from an interrupted download. This is a darned useful function you can add to a wget command, especially if you’re in an area with sketchy connectivity. To learn to make wget resume from an interrupted download, read on!

So many of my articles are written because of something I did recently. Many are still based on my copious notes (we’re well over 300 articles here on Linux Tips), but those will run out eventually. I’m often thinking of new ideas for articles and sometimes my day-to-day computing gives me an article idea that’s not from my notes. This is one of those…

Today, we’re going to cover yet another wget feature! We’ve had many wget articles. Here are a few of them:

Limit The Download Speed For ‘wget’
Rename A File Downloaded With ‘wget’
How To: Hide The Output From wget

And we’ve used wget in many articles. Go search for “wget”.

By now, many of my regular readers will be more than familiar with wget. So, what is wget? It’s a terminal-based tool that you use to download files. I use it often. You’re encouraged to check man wget for more information.

I use it outside of the browser, even if I found the download link via a browser. It’s just that handy and the throughput rate seems to be greater with wget (oftentimes). If you check the man page, wget describes itself as:

The non-interactive network downloader.

Which is exactly what it does. Which is nice…

How To: Make ‘wget’ Resume From An Interrupted Download:

You’ll kinda sorta maybe need an open terminal for this article. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard. Press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should pop open.

With your terminal open, you just need a file to download… I’ll let you pick that. You also need to interrupt your download, so that you can practice this…

Wait, no… That’s just silly. Instead of practicing this, just learn from my usage and call it good. There’s no need to replicate this until you need it. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

So, imagine my surprise when I learned that Gentoo now has a live USB edition. (I was pretty surprised.) I immediately decided to download the file, though I’ve still not tried it. To download the .iso, I used the fantastic wget tool.

My terminal was already open. My present working directory was already the ‘Downloads’ directory. I had nothing to do except enter the wget command. The command I entered was this:

As you may know, my DSL provider made me angry and I’m now using a combination of a mobile hot spot and satellite. My mobile provider likes to disconnect me for 30 minutes at a time and does so at varied intervals.

I normally just switch to the satellite connection for 30 minutes but wget didn’t like that. I’d already downloaded half of the file while tethered to my phone and didn’t want to download it again. Downloading data I’d previously downloaded is just a pain in the butt and slows things down. So, I added the -c flag. The command I then used, once connectivity was restored, was this:

Sure enough, wget resumed from where it left off when the connection dropped out. I didn’t have to download that all over again. Sure, wget will automatically retry a few times (which you can modify) but it’s not going to keep trying for 30 minutes (by default) or longer. So, this is how you make wget resume from an interrupted download.

Closure:

See, it’s easy to make wget resume from an interrupted download. Was it worth writing an entire article for a single flag? I’d say yes. Well, of course, I would say yes. If I didn’t think it was worth an entire article, I wouldn’t have written an entire article about it!

Ah well…

And now you know…

You’re welcome…

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A Couple More Ways To Find Your Network Interfaces

Today’s article is mostly just for fun, as we examine a couple more ways to find your network interfaces! I’ve shown you a variety of ways at this point, but this is Linux. If you just want to have some fun finding your network interfaces, read on – ’cause this article is meant for those who like to travel a different path!

One of the things that make Linux so awesome is the myriad choices we have. There are so many different ways to accomplish the same goal. In fact, we sometimes get defensive about ‘our way’ of accomplishing things. It can make for some amusing (and sometimes a bit heated) discussions. 

Anyhow, I’ve covered this before. I’ve even covered it recently, which is why this is still fresh in my memory. You can start with this article if you want:

How To: Show Your Network Interfaces

Just to touch on it, a network interface is a device that your computer uses to communicate over the network. In most folks’ cases, you’ll locally use your network interface to connect to the Internet, perhaps first to your router or modem. These networking devices have names.

It’s important to be able to point to a specific networking interface, which is why they have names. If you want to issue commands, you want to send them to the right networking interface. If you want to monitor a connection, you need to know the correct name for the network interface.

So, these network interfaces have names. These names should be unique in your system, meaning you shouldn’t have more than one device per name. The names should not be shared among the devices and each working networking interface should have a name of its own.

If you want to know the network interface names, this article’s for you…

Find Your Network Interfaces Continued:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, we’re going to show you a couple of new ways to find your network interfaces. It’ll be fun!

For starters, and probably one I should have already covered, we’ll use a command we’ve covered here and here. We’ll use the ‘netstat’ command, and the ‘netstat’ command you need to find your network interfaces is simply:

(If you don’t have ‘netstat’ available, install the ‘net-tools’ package from your distro’s repositories. It’s almost certainly available.) The output is nice and clear and will show you the names of your network interfaces.

The next command we’ll use is one we’ve used many times before. It’s just a two-letter command, so trying to search for it (on this site) is neigh on impossible – but you can be certain that we’ve used it before. (We’ve at least covered sorting and formatting the output from the ‘ls’ command.)

Anyhow, the command we’ll use to list the network interfaces is pretty simple, it’s just this simple command:

That ‘ls’ command should spit out a list of your network interfaces all nice and easy. If there’s going to be one command that’ll work on any system, it might be this one.

Speaking of which, as this is Linux, there are all sorts of ways to accomplish goals. Because of this, that also means they’ll not always work on every system. You may need to try multiple commands to get the output you’re after – but both of today’s commands should result in you getting the names of your network interfaces (even if you have to install ‘net-tools’ to do so).

Closure:

There you have it, another easy article. Ugh… I do wish I was feeling a bit more up to snuff. Meh… At least I’m writing and writing this sort of stuff. In this case, it’s another article that’ll show you how to find your network interfaces. It’s information worth having. They’re tools that will go well in your growing toolkit of Linux tools.

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Let’s Let AI Write An Article About ‘sed’

Today’s article is going to be about ‘sed’. However, I’ll be letting AI write it, just so we have an excuse to play with ChatGPT. I love new tech and I’m going to go against the advice given and just post the resulting article directly. 

Also, I picked ‘sed’ as an article topic because it’s a pain in the butt to explain even the basics. It’s such a powerful tool that knowing where to start can be tough. As such, I’ve decided it’s a perfect article for testing AI. I will only be formatting the suggested article.

Hey, it was this or write a meta article. I hadn’t written one for February and this will be the last article in February. Not much had changed, though we did cross some milestones, and I figured this article would be even more interesting to my readers.

Again, if there are errors, I am not to blame. I am posting the entire output after asking ChatGPT to write the article. I am only editing for the format. So, read on to see how AI is coming along. Hint: It’s doing well! It’s coming along nicely!

About ‘sed’:

“sed” is a stream editor in the Unix-like operating systems. It is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (a file or input from a pipeline). The sed command reads the specified files, or standard input if no files are specified, and applies the transformations which have been specified.

The syntax for using sed is:

Where OPTIONS can be any of the options available in the man page and COMMANDS are the instructions that tell sed what transformations to perform on the input.

One of the most common uses of sed is to replace strings. The basic syntax for string substitution is:

Where old-text is the text you want to replace, and new-text is the text you want to replace it with. For example, to replace the word “apple” with “banana” in the file “fruits.txt”, the following command could be used:

You can also use regular expressions in the old-text argument to match a more complex pattern. For example, to replace all occurrences of “apple” or “Apple” with “banana”, the following command could be used:

Another common use of sed is to delete lines. To delete a line, you can use the d command. For example, to delete the first line of the file “fruits.txt”, the following command could be used:

To delete multiple lines, specify the line numbers separated by a comma. For example, to delete lines 1 to 3 in the file “fruits.txt”, the following command could be used:

sed also supports multiple commands in a single execution. Simply separate the commands with a semicolon (;). For example, to delete the first line and replace “apple” with “banana” in the file “fruits.txt”, the following command could be used:

In addition to the commands mentioned above, there are many other powerful commands available in sed, such as inserting text, printing selected lines, and more. To learn more about these commands and other features of sed, consult the man page by running man sed in your terminal.

In conclusion, the sed command is a useful tool for performing basic text transformations on files or input from a pipeline. Its syntax is straightforward, and its wide range of commands makes it versatile enough to handle a variety of text manipulation tasks.

Closure:

There you have it. You have an article about sed – and it wasn’t written by me. So, what do you think of it? Do you think I can hang up my hat and just let AI write my articles from here on out? Do you spot any mistakes? It’s supposed to be an overview, not a complete dissertation. I think it does surprisingly well!

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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How To: Show Your Network Interfaces

Today’s article will be fairly simple, where we learn a couple of ways how to show your network interfaces. It won’t be a very long article, nor will it be all that complicated. Like almost always, today’s article will involve the terminal. So, if you want to learn how to show your network interfaces, read on!

A network interface is what’s used to connect your computer to a network. Depending on your configuration, you may have both real and virtual network interfaces. The real network interfaces will be things like your ethernet (the wired connection to the network) and a wireless device (a radio-controlled network interface).

There are times when you’ll want to know your network interface, be it for debugging or monitoring. For example, you’ll probably want to know about your network interfaces if you’re playing around with VNStat.

We’ve probably touched on this subject in a few articles. However, we might as well have an article specifically answering the question of how to show your network interfaces. Well, then, that’s what this article will cover.

Show Your Network Interfaces:

As mentioned in the intro, we’re going to be using the terminal. If you’re a regular reader, you’re probably used to it and a little tired of the same old text. Not all my readers are going to be as proficient, so they should know that they can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, your next step mostly depends on your chosen distro and the age of the default installed tools. If you’re using an older distro, you can go with this command:

If you’re using a distro with more current tools, you will likely find that ‘ifconfig’ has been deprecated, that is no longer current and in use. For you folks, you’ll need a slightly longer command:

So, if you want to show your network interfaces, one of those two commands will likely get you there. You should check the information carefully, to make sure you’re using the correct information, such as when you want to use a network interface name for another command.

Closure:

There you have it… You have another article! This time, we’ve decided to spend some time learning how to show your network interfaces. It’s nothing complicated, but it’s still useful information. It is indeed a fairly short and simple article, but that means newer users can follow along – which is a good thing. I’m sure there are other ways to gather this information, but one of those two commands should do the trick!

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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How To: Return To The Previous Working Directory In The Terminal

Today is another easy day, but one that should be productive, where we’ll learn how to return to the previous working directory. It will be a short article, but you might find it useful. If nothing else, we’re making the more terminal accessible to new users. 

These Linux tips needed to be shared some time, so it might as well be now. I don’t wish to air my medical issues, but my ailment has gone on long enough and I went to a medical professional this morning. I’m sure I’ll be fine. They say only the good die young, so I’m probably gonna live forever!

Anyhow, to learn how to return to the previous working directory (in the terminal, of course), read on! I promise, it’s easy. It’s one simple command and that’s all there is to it.

Return To The Previous Working Directory:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

This is probably more useful for very-nested directories with long names, but it won’t take that to demonstrate today’s subject. It’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s say that you’ve navigated to ~/foo and performed some functions there. Next, you’ve navigated to ~/bar and performed some functions there. Now, if you want to return to the ~/foo directory you can do so with just a simple – added to your cd command, like so:

If that’s confusing, I’ve made an image that explains it better than I can…

use cd - to return to the previous working directory
It’s a simple concept. It’s a simple article about how to return to the previous working directory.

See? It’s nice and simple! If you were in one directory and left to go to a new directory, then it’s trivial to return to the previous working directory. The image should help make it clear if my description is lacking.

You might also be interested in:

Let’s Learn About Absolute And Relative Paths
How To: Find Your Present Working Directory
How To: Make A Directory In Linux

(There are a whole lot of articles with the word ‘directory’ in them!)

Closure:

I know… I know… This is a lot of short articles in a row. I’ll feel better. I’m sure of it! Amusingly, I was asked if I had any stress in my life and it was comforting to answer that I do not. My life is pretty drama free, but I do need to get an article out every other day! This time, I’ve shown you a quick and easy way to return to the previous working directory. It’s quick, easy, and effective!

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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