Category: Command Line

How To: Extract Files From An .iso

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to extract files from an .iso. This is a good tool to add to your toolbox. You never know when you may need it. This really shouldn’t be a very long article, and even a new user should be able to follow along. Read on!

First, an .iso is really an optical disk image – even though some of the current .iso examples far exceed what you can write on a CD or even a DVD. You still use an .iso when  you’re writing a Linux live/boot USB. It’s still an optical image, you’re just not writing it to optical media. It’s a standard.

Commonly, you’ll find that Linux distros come in .iso format. You’ll also find some backup software that creates an .iso image. Traditionally, you don’t extract an .iso, you write it as a single image to your media, be it USB, CD, or DVD. But, sometimes you might want to extract files from the image file, and it’s not terribly hard to do so.

Further Reading:

How Do I Install Linux (A General Guide)
How do I ‘Boot to USB’? (Or CD/DVD, if Such is Available)
balenaEtcher: A Tool To Turn Linux .ISO Files Into Bootable USB Drives

Alas, you might have flubbed a configuration file and want to extract a known good one from the .iso you used to install Linux. You may have a backup in .iso format and not want to recover the entire image just for a few files, so you’ll want to extract the files from the .iso. There are a variety of reasons why you might want to do this, which is what we’ll learn in this article.

Extract Files From An .iso:

Just like so many previous articles, we’re going to do this in the terminal. So, crack open your terminal and we’ll get started. If you don’t know how to open your default terminal emulator, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, the first thing you have to do is make the correct directory in your /mnt (mount) directory. It looks like:

Next, you want to mount the .iso, which is done like this:

Now, at this point, you can do one of two things. If you want to remain in the terminal, you just ‘cd /mnt/iso‘ and start with ‘ls -la‘ to navigate and find the file(s) you want to extract from .iso. Pretty easy, really!

Alternatively, at this time, your system will now see the .iso as being a mounted image file. You can open your default file explorer (Nemo, PCManFM-Qt, Thunar, Dolphin, and the list goes on and on and on…) where you should see the .iso mounted, especially if you navigate to /mnt/iso. You can then navigate to that mounted image graphically, treating it like its own file system, and extract files as you see fit.

The choice is up to you. You can use a GUI file manager or just use the terminal. Both will be equally effective and allow you to extract files from an .iso. See? Not all that hard at all. Find an .iso on your system and test it.

Closure:

And there you have it, you have yet another article! This time, we’ve gone over how to extract files from an .iso. This isn’t something you’re likely to need often, but it’ll be handy when you do need it. It’s just one of those tools you stuff into the back of your mind for when you do need it – or at least enough to be able to get a reminder by way of a search engine.

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How To: Open FeatherPad At A Specific Line

Today’s article is going to show you how to open FeatherPad at a specific line. It won’t be a very long article. It won’t be a difficult article. But, ideally, it’ll be a handy article. Read on!

FeatherPad is a pretty decent, lightweight text editor. It reminds me of LeafPad quite a bit, but it’s its own separate project. You will find that FeatherPad is the default GUI plain text editor with Lubuntu, which is how I first learned of it.

FeatherPad supports things like tabs, tab drag and dropping, and can even do things like automatically close brackets when you open them. There are plenty of options, but it’s a basic text editor. You can even use CTR: + + to zoom in, and you can use CTRL + – to zoom out. That’s pretty neat.

Me? I love the ability to save a session and have the previous session open automatically when the application is started. FeatherPad lets me have a couple dozen text files that I want to keep open at all times, and this is how I do that. I just use the session manager and open the previous session when FeatherPad starts.

If you’re looking to try a new graphical text editor, I would suggest taking a look at FeatherPad. It’s certainly in your default repositories, assuming you’re using a major distro. As I mentioned above, it’s still a pretty basic editor, that could also be used as a code editor – so don’t expect too much from it, as it’s not intended to do all that much.

So then, let’s learn how to…

Open FeatherPad At A Specific Line:

You can open FeatherPad via the GUI and just navigate to the intended line. It supports line numbering, so that’s not a problem. You can also start FeatherPad from the terminal, which is what we’ll be doing here. Press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, you should probably start by installing FeatherPad. It is installed by default in Lubuntu, but to install it in something like Ubuntu you’d run this command:

Now, if you try to run ‘man featherpad‘ you’ll find out that there’s no man page associated with FeatherPad. So, to access the help documents, you’d just run:

Of course, that right there’s enough for the article. What you need to know is mostly right there in the help pages. They’re not even complicated, but that’d make for a very short article. So then…

If you want to open LeafPad at a specific line, it’s this:

A real world example of that would be something like:

You can even open LeafPad at a specific line AND at a specific column. That command isn’t much more difficult, it looks like this:

Again, for a real world example, if you want to open ~/.bashrc on line 12 and at column 5, the command would look like:

Bonus:

In all those instances above, FeatherPad will be attached to the terminal. If you close the terminal FeatherPad will also close. So, if you start the application from the terminal, you have to leave that terminal window open until you’re done with it.

If you close the terminal, FeatherPad would also close. On top of that, there’s no new line for you to continue typing further commands into the terminal. So, you can’t keep using that terminal while FeatherPad is open.

We got this figured out!

Which is also why you might want to read this previous article:

Don’t Let Applications Close When The Terminal Is Closed

Or, to save you some reading time, you can just add a ‘&‘ at the end of the terminal command to open FeatherPad at a specific line number. Like so:

If you use that command, with the ‘&‘ at the end of it, it will detach FeatherPad from the terminal, meaning you can keep FeatherPad open while still using the terminal or that you can even close the terminal while that instance of FeatherPad remains open.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have another article! This time it turned out a bit longer than I expected. I wasn’t going to include the bonus content but that seemed like a good idea. Either way, it’s not very complicated and should be a quick read.

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Find The Boot Processes That Slow You Down

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to find the boot processes that slow you down. What you do with this information is up to you. You can opt to tweak and try to speed up the boot process, or you can just learn to live with it. It shouldn’t be too long – or too hard.

Note: This article assumes you’re using systemd. If you’re not, get with the program!

With modern computers, even those a decade old, I don’t really understand the fascination with speeding up your boot process. This is especially true with Linux. After all, how often are you booting? People spend 3 hours improving the boot time by 3 seconds!

using uptime to show how long the system has been running
As you can see, I do not reboot all that often, pretty much only as needed.

Even if you reboot every day, unless your boot time is so slow that it’s indicative of a problem, you can always just press the power button as you walk by the computer to get your morning coffee.

This article is aimed towards those who have a slow boot problem. It’s aimed at you people who have slow boot times, boot processes that slow you down without good reason. People interested in optimizing their boot time can also benefit from this article, but that’s not the point.

Also, this article isn’t going to show you what to do next. This article will just be showing you how to find the boot processes that slow you down. The steps you take from there will vary based on your problems or your objectives.

Find The Boot Processes That Slow You Down:

Like oh so often, this is a trip down Terminal Lane. We do a lot in the terminal on Linux-Tips! It’s great to get new users to get comfortable with using the terminal. 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 can take a look at the boot process. To do so, let’s start with a basic command:

Picking one of the slower devices in my stable, you end up with an output similar to this picture:

output from systemd-analyze
That’s rather middle of the road, I would assume. You can get much faster and slower.

With that information, you can see how long it takes to reach ‘userspace’. For most folks, that’s going to be the number you’re interested in – as it’s when you can graphically interact with the system, usually to login to the system.

I should also mention that that’s not the total boot time. The computer has its own boot process. This time only includes what happens after POST, as the Linux operating system takes over. It doesn’t include how long you saw the original computer’s OEM logo/boot screens or anything like that. Your real-world boot time will be slightly longer.

So, let’s have some more details and see how that startup is actually working. Let’s see how long it takes for each step of the boot process. To do that, you’d want to look at the following command:

Yup, it’s a bit of clever naming. It’s systemd letting you know what process(es) to blame for a slow boot time. Pretty handy, huh?

If you want, you can even make a nifty picture of the boot process – a picture that includes showing  you the dependencies needed to complete the boot process. 

That’ll output an image that’s quite large, to large to bother including, but it’s easy enough to understand. If you’re having serious issues booting, that image might be something you can share with a forum when you’re asking for assistance.

What steps you take next will depend on your individual situation. If you’re looking to speed up your boot process, you can mask services that you don’t need. If you’re having problematic services and/or dependencies, your situation will be different and require different fixes.

Closure:

And there you have it! You have another article. This article tells you how to find boot processes that slow you down, so it’s an article that could be helpful to all sorts of people. Once you have this information, you can start looking to make changes. It’s a handy way to get boot process information with systemd.

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How To: Show systemd Services

Today we’re going to have a quick and easy article, one where I show you how to show systemd services. We’ll explore a way to show all services and those services that are currently running. It’ll be nice and easy. 

At this point, systemd isn’t really all that controversial. It was for a while and there are still some people who work kinda hard to not use systemd. That’s their right and I support their choices, but I dare say that most of us now use systemd and that aiming articles at the majority is a good idea. So, I have no problem covering systemd stuff – and I have even less trouble treating it as though systemd is the default.

It’s kinda hard to pin down a definition for systemd. It’s far more than an init system, which it was replacing fairly early on. It has grown to encompass quite a bit more than that. So, let’s just look at how Wikipedia describes systemd.

systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux[6] operating systems. Its main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions;[7] Its primary component is a “system and service manager”—an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging.

So, you can see it’s pretty expansive. For this article, we’ll be looking at the service manager aspect and how to show your systemd services. Let’s just jump into the article, so that we can keep it relatively brief.

Show systemd Services:

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. (I say this so very, very often…)

So, I said I wanted to keep this article brief – and there’s really no reason to make it longer, so this is how you show all the myriad systemd services:

Or you can try:

Either one or both of those commands should show you all the systemd services, regardless of what state they’re in. Though it should show you the state of the services listed.

A more useful command for most of us would be for us to show the various systemd services that are currently active. Of course you can do that! It’s Linux! You can do everything! It’s not even hard! Just try this command:

You can also try this command:

If you pay attention to the syntax, you can also opt to show those systemd services that are inactive. It’s probably pretty obvious, but try this:

Or you can try this one (’cause you have choices):

So, as you see, you can show the systemd services in total, show the active systemd services, or choose to show the systemd services that are inactive. It’s not a complicated task and there’s no reason to make it seem complicated. As the tag line says, we’re slowly but surely bringing you up to speed!

Closure:

And there you have it. You have a new article! This time you’ve learned how to show all of your assorted services – and to show the services in all their running states. Some folks like to make this sort of thing look complicated, but it’s really very easy. So, enjoy the new article and know that I appreciate your readership.

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.

How To: Scan A Remote Host For Open Ports

In today’s article, we’re going to learn another way to scan a remote host for open ports. It’s actually going to be an easy article to follow, suitable even for beginners. Read on, I promise it’s not all that complicated! We can make this pretty simple.

There are a couple of reasons why you’d want to scan for open ports. You may want to know what ports you have open, or you may be interested in penetrating a remote host and want to know what ports are open (and things like what services are running on them).

This may seem  a little familiar. We recently used the ‘nc’ command to check if a specific port is open. You can (and should) read that article (it goes into describing ports, so it’s worth reading as I don’t want to duplicate the work) here:

How To: Check If A Specific Port Is Open

Again, if you’re not all that familiar with ports, you should read that article. It explains them in more detail.

The tool we’re going to use is ‘nmap‘, a familiar tool that’s used by security professionals, but can be used for our purposes just fine. It’s not all that daunting, which is why I feel even a beginner can learn to scan a remote host for open ports.

Installing nmap:

Alas, nmap is seldom installed by default. As such, you’ll need to install it. We’ll do that in the terminal. If you need to open a terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

So, let’s get nmap installed:

Fedora/Derivatives:
Debian/Ubuntu:
RHEL/CentOS:

I know those should work, but nmap will certainly be in most default repositories. You should be able to install it with your package manager. Once you have nmap installed, you can check the man page to see how nmap describes itself:

There, you’ll see:

nmap – Network exploration tool and security / port scanner

Which, as you can guess, is a pretty good description. You’ll also notice that there are a whole lot of options. It’s a pretty complicated command. Don’t worry, we’ll make it easy for our goal, which is too…

Scan A Remote Host For Open Ports:

You should have an open terminal from the previous section. You’ll need that. While there are graphical tools for scanning for open ports, nmap is not one of them. You use nmap in the terminal, like so many of the great Linux applications.

So, then let’s start with the basics. If you want to scan a remote host for open ports, your best starting point will be:

For example, you could use Linux-Tips.us as a test:

Or you can use a computer on the same network via the hostname or IP address. That’d look like:

However, that command won’t actually scan all the possible ports. It only scans the 1000 most common ports, which is usually what you’re after. You can scan the entire range of ports if you want. That’d look like:

If you want, you can actually scan for a specific port to see if that port is open on the remote host. That’s a bit more complicated, but not much. Try a command that looks like this:

To try to make that more clear, see the following example to check to see if the default SSH port is open:

I’ve even made you an example image of the above commands:

a number of nmap commands being used to scan a remote host for open ports
As you can see, it’s pretty easy to use nmap to scan a remote host for open ports.

See? While nmap may seem daunting when you first check the man page, it’s pretty easy to use nmap to scan a remote host for open ports. It’s even easy enough for a newbie to use!

Closure:

Well, that’s another article. I have yet to run out of notes and I have yet to run out of ideas for articles. So, there are likely to be even more articles written. Eventually, I’m sure to run out – or need a break. But, for now, you have an article that tells you how to scan a remote host for open ports. It’s even easy enough for a beginner.

The nmap application is one of the first tools you’ll learn when you decide to learn about network security. If you want to probe a site for security holes, it’s important to know which doors are open and available for you to explore. Well, that’s where tools like nmap come into play and this article will get you started.

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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