Category: Command Line

How To: List All Users In Linux

If you want to list all users in Linux, this is the article for you. It should be a fairly short article, but it should tell you how to list all users. So, there’s that. By that, I mean it’ll probably do what it says on the tin, namely telling you how to list all your users.

You may want to check the list of users from time to time. Applications may add users, you may have added users, malicious software or people may have added users, etc… There are other reasons to list all users, but you get the idea.

This is a beginner-level exercise, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty with it. It should also be reasonably short, which is nice! If you find any mistakes or have any questions, scroll down and leave a comment. You can also ask on the lovely Linux.org forums.

Without further ado…

List All Users:

Once again, we start with opening the terminal. To do this, you just press CTRL + ALT + T and the terminal should open. That’s true on most distros that I’ve encountered. If not, you will still need an open terminal.

Got it open? Good, ’cause it’s a pretty easy operation. The file you’re looking for is ‘/etc/passwd’, which is a plain text file that’s in conjunction with the /etc/shadow file. Like most text files, it’s easy enough to work with them in the terminal.

You probably shouldn’t edit /etc/passwd by hand, but we’re just going to be viewing it.

So, to show the content of the file (and see the list of users):

If you want to show fewer results at a time, you can just use:

If you want, you can ‘grep’ a specific user. Just pipe the output to grep and you’re good to go. It looks like this:

If you want to use that format AND have numbered lines, one way of finding out how many users there are, then just use:

Though you could just as easily have used this to get the number:

If you want to list just the users, you can use ‘awk’ and pick the first column like this:

And that’s about it, really. You’ve now listed all the users – and counted ’em!

Closure:

That’s it! That’s all there is to it, and you’ve learned a little bit more – this time how to list users in Linux. I told you that it’d be pretty painless and easy. Plus, this is another article for the books – and this one authored early enough to give me some time to keep scheduling them ahead of time.

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.

When Did I Last Reboot My Linux Box?

If you want to know when you did your last reboot on your Linux box, it’s actually pretty easy. This article explains how. I’m still not feeling quite up to snuff, so a quick and easy article is the call for the day!

You can run uptime in the terminal, and that will tell you how long your system has been up and running. The output will look something like this:

At this point, you could do the math and find your last reboot time. Of course, this being Linux, there’s an easier way to do this. This will be a quick (and easy) article and hopefully I’m doing a bit better tomorrow.

Find Last Reboot:

Like so many of these things, we need to start with the terminal open. You can do that by using your keyboard. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal emulator should pop right up!

With that open, you can start with:

Which will give you an output similar to:

But, the command’s usefulness doesn’t stop there. No, no it does not! You can modify the command in a couple of ways to get some more refined response. Let’s say you only want the last three results? If so, you’d use this command:

This will give you an output like this:

You can also use ‘grep’ for your refining needs. Let’s say you want to know when you last rebooted in the month of May? Well, you can easily do that!

The output of which would look similar to this:

And, there you see it. As you can see, there were three reboots in the month of May on that box. This information may be useful for debugging reasons or even compliance reasons. How you use the information is up to you! Ain’t my job to tell you how.

Closure:

There. There’s your darned article for the day!

Seriously, yesterday’s article was really messed up. Fortunately, the kind folks at Reddit chimed in and were eager to help! The folks at Linux.org are usually good at catching the mistakes, of which there were many, but probably didn’t as the article is one from the old site and probably only skimmed it if they read it at all.

This leads me to think that I’m eventually going to have issues with getting an article up every other day. I’m still going to try, and I’ve done so since the start, but it’s pretty likely that I’ll eventually miss a day. I’ll try to take steps to not let that happen, but the real world is a fickle mistress.

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.

Install An FTP Server With VSFTPD

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is still a useful, if less secure, and quick way to transfer files from one computer to another. If you’ve enabled SSH, then SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is likely available and it’s truly a better option than FTP. If SFTP is an option, you should probably use it.

There are still people who prefer FTP and situations where FTP makes sense. I actually use it to transfer files around my home network with some regularity. Not only does it let me transfer files, I can also use the FTP application to do things like rename files, copy and move files, and even change file permissions. It’s more about the application at that point, I suppose. Of course, most FTP clients handle SFTP just fine these days.

FTP isn’t all that secure and, again, SFTP is likely a better option in every way, but VSFTPD is “VS” – meaning “Very Secure.” I mean, that’s what they claim – and they do have some security configuration options. So, it has that going for it.

Either way, this article is gonna tell you how to install it. What you do with that information is entirely up to you! If you do eventually want to use this information, there are a couple of previous articles that might suit your needs.

You might need to know about hostnames. Click here.
You may wish to know your IP address. Click here.

With that information read and at hand, let’s jump into installing VSFTPD!

Enable FTP with VSFTPD:

The reason I picked VSFTPD for this is because it’s pretty much universally available. It’s there for all the major distros, readily available in your default repositories. We’re not going to get deep into any configuration options, nor are we even going to discuss securing it. We’re simply going to install it and let you loose on the world!

To that end, why don’t we crack open our terminal? To do that, you can just use your keyboard – press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. 

With that step done, let’s go ahead and install it:

Debian/Ubuntu:

Fedora/RHEL:

SEL/OpenSUSE:

Arch/Manjaro:

One of those should do the trick for the major distros. As much as I’d like to just leave it there, that’s not quite enough. I’ll also let you know that your configuration is largely done in  /etc/vsftpd.conf and you can use man vsftpd.conf to learn about configuring your new FTP server.

For the configuration basics, you’ll want to enable writing to the server (so that you can change files, including uploading them) and you’ll likely want to enable local access. Like other configuration files, you may need to remove the # from the start of the lines in order for them to be read and take effect. To comment out lines, you just add a # to the start of the line and the line will be ignored.

You can use nano, vim, or any plain text editor you want to edit the files. However, changes won’t take effect until after you restart the FTP server’s daemon. To do that, you use this command:

With this done, you can connect to your FTP server by using the hostname or the IP address, internal or external. There are links at the first section of the article that tell you how to find that information, though the site’s search works just fine. See? I actually DID have a reason for posting those!

Again, SFTP is a much better option. I actually plan on doing an article about SFTP, but that article requires linking to this sort of article and so I might as well write it first!

Closure:

And there you have it… Yet another article in the books. If you’d like to do a guest article, you can just write it and I’ll do the rest! Every other day as a publishing schedule isn’t too bad, but a break would be fun. Either way, enjoy your new FTP server and good luck!

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 Install INXI

INXI is something I mention a lot. In fact, I’ve done a whole INXI article before, I like it that much. It makes sharing detailed hardware information easy. The people trying to help you when you need support may need detailed information about your hardware, which is where INXI excels and why it exists.

You may notice that I didn’t actually link to said previous article. It was a very different article. This one is really just about installing INXI, so that you can toss it out as a quick link while asking for more information. I’ll rewrite the old article to suit this site, probably when I want an ‘easy’ article. Anyhow…

When you post on forums, such as Linux.org, your question may require sharing information about your hardware. Unless otherwise specified, the way I’d run INXI is this:

Or:

The output of either of those will give you an adequate amount of information and covers most all the bases. It’s most of the available information without being all of the available information. You may be asked to run a more specific command and you should post the data between the [code]<output from command>[/code] tags to make it more easily read.

So, why this article? Well, there might as well be an article that tells you how to install it. This? This is that article. You’re welcome!

Installing INXI:

Let’s get right to it and start with the easy way. Start by opening  your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. Once that’s open, use the following command as is appropriate for your distro’s package manager.

Debian/Ubuntu: 

RHEL/Fedora:

Manjaro:

OpenSUSE:

Any of those should work with the right distro. INXI is a commonly used application and a great tool for your toolbox. So, depending on your distro, use one of those commands.

If you need to install it manually, and you’ll likely need elevated permissions for this, you can just run:

Because that doesn’t include the man page, you can grab that and install it with a simple command:

If nothing else, those last two commands should work on every Linux desktop system out there, though I suppose you may need to first install wget and need permission to write to the correct directories.

Now that you have INXI (and the manual) installed, just use the inxi -h command. If you’re asking for support somewhere, they’ll probably tell you which command they want you to run when they ask you to run it.

See also: https://smxi.org/​

Closure:

Yup… This is a short article, and intentionally so. The goal here is to write an article that helps people install INXI. I think I’ve done that. I may write an article that’s more detailed, meaning ways of using INXI, but today is not that day. Today, it’s just about installation.

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.

Terminology: View Pictures And Video Directly In Your Terminal

Have you ever wanted to view pictures, watch videos, or listen to music directly in the terminal? No? Me either! But, with Terminology you can! The bad news is that it means completely changing your terminal to a new one, or at least using a different terminal when you want to do these things.

If you’re interested, read: Let’s Learn How To Change The Default Terminal

If you can find a way to view media in Terminator, or a ‘regular’ terminal (not to open it in a different application from the terminal), then please let me know. Try as I might, I can’t find a way to do that. If you know a way, please let me know! The idea of quickly checking through images in the terminal appeals to me. None of the rest really appeals to me, but appealing to me isn’t actually a prerequisite for this site!

Anyhow, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to do these things except to pick a terminal that has those features built in. Fortunately, sitting in my notes was a reference to “Terminology”, a terminal emulator that’ll do just that. I suppose this counts as a review of sorts, and so I’ll treat it a bit like that.

About The Terminology Terminal:

Terminology comes from the Enlightenment folks and is built with ELF. ELF, it turns out, stands for “Enlightenment Foundation Libraries”. Those are the base libraries behind the Enlightenment window manager. So, if you’ve used Enlightenment as your window manager, you may have already encountered Terminology. And, if you’re interested in the Enlightenment window manager, click here. 

Terminology, according to them, has “whole bunch of bells and whistles.” And, well, they’re not wrong. For example, scrollback (the history of commands) is stored in RAM rather than written to disk. This adds some session security and is a great feature – unless you actually want that data stored. 

Not only does Terminology understand email addresses and URLs, you can use it to find the Gravatar associated with an email address. It seems that it can even display files like PDF, PS, DOC, and more directly inside the terminal itself – and it properly scales them. If you take the time, you can also highly customize it to suit your needs.

You can read more about it here. It’s bound to get more features as time goes on, and it’d be just silly for me to copy and paste all the information on that page. Just read it yourself! That’ll save me some time!

Get Terminology Terminal Emulator:

Chances are good that Terminology is already in your default repositories. But, you should be aware, installing Terminology will add a whole lot of dependencies. If you’re worried about disk space or adding system overhead, it should be noted that it pulled in over 80 MB worth of dependencies on a stock Ubuntu build. It relies on the above mentioned “ELF” and that means it’s a lot to add for just a terminal.

Beyond that, it’s likely easy enough to install. Just crack open your current terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T and pick the correct command for your system:

Debian/Ubuntu:

Arch/Manjaro:

SEL/OpenSUSE:

RHEL/Fedora:

Pick the right one for your package management system and it should install. If it doesn’t install, if it’s not available for your system, it’s possible to build and install – but that’s a whole lot of work ’cause of all those dependencies.

Use Terminology:

Now that you have installed Terminology, you can open it from your application menu – typically under a heading similar to “System Tools”. If you can’t find it, search for it. You could also open it from the terminal you have opened already by just using the terminology command.

To open a picture, video, or music file, it’s actually pretty simple. To open it directly in the terminal itself, it’s just:

You can also open it in a separate window, though I suppose that kinda defeats the whole purpose of this exercise. To open it in a separate window, you just change the command to:

Those are the commands to open the media files (pictures, videos, and music) in the terminal. They’re pretty neat and I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. It aims to be fairly similar to xterm, so it should be easy enough to for anyone to get comfortable with it while providing powerful options beyond the ability to play media.

Closure:

As I said I’d review this, or at least treat it like a review, I’ll look at it from my perspective. There are no really compelling features for me to switch. If I did switch, I’d surely be comfortable customizing it to suit my needs.

It’s easy to change features like the default window size, colors, and fonts. You can find a situation where the additional features are beneficial and make it your own. Being able to make it your own is an important feature.

While those features are great, and it’s overall a speedy application, I’m comfortable giving it a solid 8 stars. It’s a bloated piece of software that is only going to appeal to a limited group of users. Yes, the bloat is necessary, but it’s still a terminal at the end of the day. If you’re that interested, you could look into using Enlightenment as your window manager.

So, download Terminology, play with it for a half hour, realize it’s not something you are going to use every day (or maybe decide that it is your new favorite terminal), and forget to uninstall it while it languishes in your application menu until the next major upgrade requires a clean installation. If nothing else, you can have some fun with it.

It may actually have some value for people and systems that are forced to work in the terminal and only in the terminal. Maybe you want to monitor a security camera without installing a full-blown desktop environment, or something like that? I could see situations where it may come in handy.

Thanks for reading! There’s another article in the books! 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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