Category: Command Line

How To: Find Out When A File Was Created

Today, we’re going to learn how to find out when a file was created. Odds are good that you could use the right click menu in a GUI file manager and figure it out, or you can sort by time and show details, that sort of stuff. Those being ‘easy’ we’ll learn how to find out when a file was created in the terminal.

Yeah, a lot of these articles explain how to do things in a terminal – even when there’s a nice graphical way to accomplish those same things. While it’s true that we may have different shells, we’re far more universal in the terminal than we are in a graphical desktop environment.

It’s good to learn how to do things in the terminal. If you can accomplish your goal in the terminal – you can accomplish it quickly and easily everywhere. That’s a pretty great benefit. (It’s not even unique to Linux – as you can do a whole lot via command line in Windows and MacOS.)

Also, today’s article feels a bit like work. I was hoping that it’d take longer to really start feeling that way. It’s okay. I picked a brief subject, what should be a short article, and that’ll be almost like a day off.

Find Out When A File Was Created:

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 open, change to the directory that contains the file you want to find out when it was created. Let’s say it’s in your Documents directory:

Now, you can just use the -l flag with the ls command. That’d look like this –  showing the creation date (and maybe time, if the file is recent enough) for all the files in that directory:

That’s pretty messy, especially if you have a lot of files in the directory. So, you can specify the file for which you want to find the creation date by specifying the filename in the command itself, like so:

That’ll do it for you. Well, it should do it for you! If not, something’s broken and don’t ask me to fix it!

Closure:

There you have it… You can now tell when a file was created. It’s not a very difficult process and it’s one you can easily commit to memory. I find myself using it when I’ve created a file and then can’t find it among other files with similar names – I’ll check to wee when a file was created and figure it out that way.

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Monitor rsync’s Progress

In this article, we’re going to learn how to monitor rsync’s progress. It’s a pretty trivial article, but it’s something you may want to know – especially if you’re using rsync often. Read on and learn how to monitor the progress of rsync. 

For the curious, I use rsync every day. It’s a part of what I do to beta test Lubuntu. It’s pretty handy for syncing my existing .iso with a fresh daily .iso, saving both Ubuntu and I a bunch of bandwidth.

I also use it locally. If I want to backup something like my home directory, there aren’t many better choices. Rather than mess with various applications, I can just write a simple command and can even automate it by making it a cronjob. 

However, it’s nice to get some feedback. It’s nice to see how far and how fast the syncing is taking place. It’s handy to monitor rsync’s progress. There are a couple of neat ways to do this, so I’ll show you them. 

If you don’t know, rsync is a tool used to sync files. It’s great for copying files from one location to another location. It even has some checks and balances, so it’s pretty great. By the way, the man page defines it like:

rsync – a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool

Which I think is an apt and fair description. So, with that in mind, let’s move into the article about how to …

Monitor rsync’s Progress:

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.

For the most part, rsync works like so:

Now, you can just show the progress with the -av flags. The ‘a’ for “archive” and the ‘v’ is for verbose. That is a handy command. You will also need the ‘–info=progress2’ to go along with it. 

To use it, it might look something like this (to backup sync your entire home directory in this example):

See? That’ll output the progress as you go. For local stuff, that’s pretty much my ‘go-to’ command, or close enough.

But wait, there’s more!

That’s right, there’s more to know if you want to monitor rsync’s progress!

First, install ‘progress’. It’s probably not installed by default, so you’ll have to install it manually with your own package manager. For example, with apt in Ubuntu, it’s just:

With that done, it’s a tiny application, open up another terminal window – so that rsync is still happily running in your first terminal instance, and run the following command in the second terminal:

Pretty frickin’ neat, huh? You can monitor your rsync command’s progress quite easily with that command. It gives you a pretty good readout for your rsync’s progress. If nothing else, it’ll keep you amused while your data syncs. 

Closure:

Yay! Today you have another article. I still haven’t missed a day. You’ve had an article every other day for a long time now. Well, today is no different and in this article you learning how to monitor rsync’s progress – a pretty handy tool, especially for the inquisitive. 

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Let’s Take A Look At Logged In Users

Today is a good day to learn how to take a look at logged in users. The vast majority of my readers are desktop users, so you can mostly skip this article. On the other hand, when you take a look at logged in users, you might find users you didn’t know were logged in and discover a problem like unknown users.

Yeah, most of you – including me at the moment (which makes it difficult to do things like take useful screenshots) are using Linux (mostly) as a single user. You have a user and you login to that user account when you start your system up.

While you do have other system-configured users, you don’t generally login as those users. As such, you probably spend very little time thinking about the users you have. Those system users aren’t generally logged in but are there for permissions purposes, so they’re out of mind for most of us.

Well, for the rest of you, you can use this article to learn how look logged in users – even getting a glimpse at what they’re doing. I mentioned some difficulty in taking screenshots, so I’ll provide you with just one. Cherish it, as it’s the only one you’re getting!

Here it is:

looking at other users
See? I’ll reference some of this below, in the article itself. I might as well…

Have A Look At Logged In Users:

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.

As you can see from the image above you can see all the logged in users with the first command. The following command will list them:

You’ll see the same thing, with a bit more information, when you use the following command:

Now, in the image above, you can see where I used it once and then ran it again. What you don’t see is that, in between those two commands, I opened up another TTY and logged in again as ‘kgiii’. If you want to replicate that, just press CTRL + ALT, then F3 to F6, and login at the prompt with any user(s) you happen to have.

Finally, you can get a look at what they’re doing – like one has a desktop session open and two of those login instances just have bash sessions open in TTY sessions. To do that,  you just use:

That should be easy enough for you to remember! By the way, if you did login as an additional TTY instance, run ‘users‘ again and you’ll see the output for that command has changed accordingly. The command’s output will may also give you a good idea about how long the system has been up and what the system resources are like.

Closure:

There you have it. You have learned how to have a look at logged in users so that you can have an idea of what’s going on with your system. If you spot a user you don’t recognize, that might be indicative of a problem. If you spot a user you don’t recognize, you’ll need to do some more investigating. By the way, if you have ‘finger’ installed you can always run ‘finger <username>‘.

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How To: Clear The apt Cache

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to clear the apt cache. This is only useful if your distro uses the apt package manager. If your distro doesn’t use apt, this article is of no use to you. This isn’t a complicated article, but it’s one that should probably be included on this site.

If you don’t know if your distro uses apt, you really need to pay more attention! However, run ‘which apt‘ in the terminal and it’ll let  you know if apt is present.

If you’re using Debian, Ubuntu, an official Ubuntu flavor, or any derivative thereof (such as Mint), you’re using ‘apt’ as your package manager. Of course, if you’re new and not all that familiar with apt, you’re able to use this site’s search feature and find out some more information. Feel free to do so, as I’ve written a few articles on various apt features.

If you want, you can read this article from FOSSLinux for a great rundown on APT vs aptitude, that’ll also answer some other questions along the way. It’s a great article to understand apt, not just the differences between apt and aptitude.

When you install applications and updates with apt, the .deb files are cached on your device. In time, this can build up and use more space than you really want to have spent on such a feature. So, let’s learn how to clean it.

Clear The apt Cache:

Obviously, this article requires an open 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.

Now, you can see what is going to be deleted – which directories that is – by using the dry-run flag.

Those are the directories which will be cleaned. The first command you might already know is this one, which seems to be one of the favorites for new users:

However, that only removes cached packages if there’s a newer version in the repositories. I don’t really see much use for that, but it’s there, a feature, and often a command that newbies are told to run.

Instead, you can clear out all those directories of no-longer-needed .deb files. Just run the first command without actually doing a dry run. It is done like so:

That’s really all there is to it. I mostly wanted to ensure folks knew how to clear the cache – and that the difference between the commands was mentioned somewhere on the site. I don’t expect the site to be some giant repository that’s ‘complete’, but I do need to cover the basics now and again.

Closure:

Well, today you’ve learned to clear the apt cache. Again, this isn’t going to do you any good if you’re using RHEL, Fedora, or even Arch! But, if you use a distro that uses apt, you might as well know this information. And, well, now you do…

Also, I linked to another site with similar content! I don’t do that often! Their write-up was just too good to pass up, so I don’t mind sending them the traffic. It saved me like an hour’s worth of writing – while trying to fit it into a block of no more than 300 words. So, I’m very, very much okay with linking to content like that.

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.

Let’s Upgrade Fedora From The Terminal

Today’s a good day for a short article, like one on how to upgrade Fedora from the terminal. It’s a pretty easy task, yet one I have in my notes. I see no reason to not turn it into a nice, short article. After all, you might not know how to upgrade Fedora from the terminal!

Obviously, you’re going to need Fedora installed for this. Though, technically, I’m sure you could do this if you were trying the live instance of Fedora. I mean, you could…

Anyhow, all operating systems should get updates. If you’re not getting updates, something is wrong. The most obvious ‘wrong’ in this is that you’re using an operating system that’s no longer supported. By doing so,  and doing so online, you are not just a risk to yourself – but you’re a risk to other users.

For example, you could be compromised and become a part of a botnet. That’d be bad. So, stay updated – not just for yourself but to be a good member of the community. Use a distro that’s still supported.

Lest you think this is a weird article, I’ve actually also written:

How To: Update Ubuntu From The Terminal

See? ‘Snot the first time we’ve had this sort of article. 

Well, let’s get into it. Let’s learn how to …

Upgrade Fedora From The Terminal:

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 open,  you can start with a very simple command:

That’s “it”, I guess… Well, no… That’s all you need to do to upgrade your system. If your system requires a reboot, you do that with:

Now, here’s a little trick…

Let’s say your upgrade screwed something up. You upgraded to a new version of Thunderbird and you want to roll back to a previous version. You can do that without much effort. 

Obviously, change the name of the application to the application you’re having problems with. Well, each upgrade will have a number assigned to it and it’ll show that number when you run the above command. You use that number in this command:

That will undo the most recent upgrade to that application, restoring a usable application for you. You can then try it again when the application is next upgraded.

See? It’s a neat little trick with ‘dnf’. Feel free to check the man page, with man dnf, to see what other little gems you can find.

Closure:

See? I told you that it’d be a nice and easy article. This one isn’t difficult – but does have a neat feature not everyone knows about, that is how to rollback upgrades with DNF when you have chosen to upgrade Fedora from the terminal.

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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