Category: Tips

Show Your Filesystem In The Linux Terminal

Today is going to be a good day if you have decided that you want to show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. If that’s not what you want to do, this might not be the article for you! If it is what you want to do, read on!

I’m going to try to keep this fairly short. There are two commands that I have available to help you show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. There are surely other ways to do so, but I’ll just cover two different ways.

Both of them will be quite simple…

These two commands should be fairly standard. They should work in your distro, regardless of which distro you’ve chosen. There’s nothing special about them.

What do I mean when I say ‘show your filesystem in the Linux terminal’? I mean you can see, and identify, your various drives and their partitions. You can also learn a bit more information about them, but the general idea is that you can see and learn about them in the terminal.

Like I said, this won’t be fairly complicated. It will involve the terminal.

Show Your Filesystem In The Linux Terminal:

Yes, I said the terminal. You will need an open terminal. If you want to open your default terminal, you can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T. That will open your default terminal more often than not. Otherwise, open it from your terminal.

Now, to get to the point… I’m going to show you a couple of commands that you can use to show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. 

Ready?

lsblk:

The first tool we’ll use is lsblk. This is installed by default on any major distro and you won’t need to install anything. If you check the man page, you’ll see that lsblk is described like this:

lsblk – list block devices

That command sounds useful. Block devices are disks, drives, partitions, and the like. So, you can just run that command in the terminal. It looks like this:

The output is easy enough to understand. It might look something like this:

That’s with a bunch of junk still plugged in from a previous article. You can see that the output is easy enough to understand.

df:

The next command we’re going to use is the ‘df’ command. Again, you shouldn’t need to install anything to use the df command. This is something that should already be installed and if you want to use it to show your filesystem type in the Linux terminal, it’s quite easy.

First, you should check the man page. If you do, you’ll see that df is described as:

df – report file system disk space usage

Once again, that sounds like a fine tool for learning about your filesystem. You’ll want two flags. The first flag is -T and will show you the file system type. The second flag is -h and that means it’ll spit the output in human-readable form. An example of that command would look like:

An example output would look like this:

Again, that’s nice and easy to understand. If you want to show your filesystem information, these commands are easily memorized.

You’ll notice that both output is quite similar, as it should be. There are only so many filesystems available in the distro I used to write this. This information can be quite a bit more complicated if you’re running it against a NAS with lots of different storage options, but it’s generally easy enough to understand.

Closure:

There you go… This isn’t even a very long article – because it doesn’t need to be. I wanted to show you how to show your filesystem information in the Linux terminal. None of these commands are all that difficult to use and remember. You can also get some useful information from the mount | grep "^/dev" command, so keep that in mind along with the commands shown in this article.

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List Installed Software In Lubuntu

There may come a point in your Linux journey where you must list the installed software in Lubuntu. This is easily done and I will show you a couple of quick ways to get this list in the terminal. So, if you want to list installed software in Lubuntu, this is the article for you!

I’m writing this article because it’s quick and easy. I won’t make this article as long as I’ve made recent articles. We’re just going to get to the point, more or less. I will show you a couple of different ways, each with its own merits. You can decide which way works for you.

The article headline and related material reference Lubuntu. That’s because I’m using Lubuntu when I write this article. I am a Lubuntu member, after all. It makes sense that I’d be using Lubuntu!

Plus, it’s a weekend. I’ve formalized the idea that articles written during weekends will be easier. I have a life outside of writing articles and doing other things to help the Linux community. (It’s amazing, but it’s true!)

However, you can use these commands on anything that uses dpkg or apt. That means you can use these commands on Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and myriad other distros that use .deb files as their software packages. These commands are fairly universal across those distros and you shouldn’t have any issue running either of them on any of those machines.

Caveat:

The following commands will not show you Snap packages or flatpak packages. Software installed by those means does not show up in these commands. Only software installed with dpkg/apt (which includes all .deb packages even if you used a GUI installation method) will be shown.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem.

To show flatpak applications:

To show Snap applications:

AppImages aren’t really installed and I can find no way to list those that make sense. Sure, we could use the find command and list any .appimage file, but that won’t tell us if you use it. We’ll just ignore those for the sake of simplicity and to stay within the realms of ‘reasonable’.

List Installed Software In Lubuntu:

In the opening paragraph, I mentioned that this was something you’d be doing in the terminal. That means you need an open terminal. As you’re using Lubuntu, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and QTerminal should open right up.

With your terminal now open, the first command we’ll be using is dpkg. This will not show all the installed applications at the same time. This outputs a nicely formatted list. You can see the version of the software on the right. It’s easy to understand.

It will show you a page at a time and your arrow button lets you scroll down to see them all. To exit the list, you press the Q button on your keyboard. To list installed software in Lubuntu with dpkg, you simply run the following command:

The second command might be a little more useful, but it’s not formatted nearly as nicely. This time around, we’ll be using the apt command. If you don’t know, apt is basically a front end for dpkg. Now you know.

If you want to use apt to list installed software in Lubuntu, you would just run the following command:

That will spit out the entire list, though you could pipe it to the less command. To do that, try this command:

That will output the list a page at a time. Like the above dpkg command, if you want to exit the list, you just press the Q button on your keyboard.

This command is also useful to create a list of installed applications. Again, this won’t list Snaps or flatpaks, but it will list the traditionally installed applications. That means it’s pretty useful to create a list, especially if you want to recreate the system later. To do that, just run this command:

There you go, you now have a handy list of installed applications in Lubuntu! Pretty easy, isn’t it?

That’s all there is to it today. 

Closure:

Yeah, it’s a weekend. This article might just break 800 words, so it’s not nearly as long as many of my recent articles. This time around,  you’ve learned how to list installed software in Lubuntu. It wasn’t even that complicated and you’ve been given the choice between two commands. Just pick the one that works for you and commit it to memory. You’ll be golden and have taken one more step in your route of Linux learning.

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.

Find The Last Filesystem Check

If you’ve been using Linux for any time, you may have done a filesystem check and today we’ll find out when you did the last filesystem check with the Linux terminal. This may seem a little complicated, at least at the start, but it should be relatively easy. New Linux users should be able to follow along as we try to make Linux more approachable.

Disks have corruption after a while. Given enough time and data, a filesystem check is likely. Fortunately, Linux has many tools that will help you verify the integrity of your data. These tools are generally installed by default, so we shouldn’t need to install any new tools in this tutorial.

The article will have been tested in Lubuntu. The directions in this article are going to work with Ubuntu, official Ubuntu flavors, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, and many more distros. I’d say they’re fairly generic instructions and that all these tools will be installed by default in most major distros.

You need good data health. This isn’t about hardware health as much as you’d learn from S.M.A.R.T data, it’s about the integrity of your data. You might use the information from this article to decide to run an fdisk command or two. Of course, you might also be interested in one of my more popular articles:

Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

What we’re going to do is find out when the last filesystem check. What you do with that information is up to you. 

We will be using some tools…

lsblk:

The first tool we’ll be using is one of the default Linux tools. The name of that tool is lsblk. You can verify that lsblk is installed with the following command:

The output should look similar to this:

If you run man lsblk in the terminal, you’ll find that it’s described as this:

lsblk – list block devices

We’ll be using this lsblk command to identify drive names. It’s not complicated and you’ll be able to follow along easily enough. I’m sure of it!

tune2fs:

We’ll also be using the tune2fs command in this exercise. As far as I can tell, tune2fs doesn’t have a formal version flag. If you run a typical version command against it, it does spit out the version but it also spits out some usage information. So, that will do for verifying that you do indeed have tune2fs installed. You can run this command:

The output will look weird, but it’ll confirm that tune2fs is installed. 

Of course, the man page describes tune2fs like this:

tune2fs – adjust tunable file system parameters on ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems

While that might not seem useful, it is. We’ll be using it to get those system parameters to find out when you did the last system check. Trust me! It’ll come in handy.

We’ll also be using a pipe and grep, but we’ve used those many times before.

Find Your Last Filesystem Check:

If it’s not obvious, we’ll be using the terminal for this. So, press CTRL + ALT + T and let’s get this party started.

The first thing you do is you want to identify the name of the drive. Don’t blame me for calling it the name. That’s what the command outputs. That’s what I’m calling it. The command for this is nice and simple, just run this command:

I plugged a bunch of stuff in, so an example output might look like this:

Next, your command looks like this:

This isn’t always going to spit out the right information. If a drive isn’t an EXT* formatted partition/drive, it’s not going to spit out any useful information. There will be no information if you try to use it with your EFI partition, for example.

An example EFI command and output might be:

On the other hand, an example of a good output might be like this:

As you can see, that was checked just a couple of months ago.

Alternatively, as I plugged some rather random stuff into the USB ports, you might see something as old as this:

That’s been a minute or two since the last filesystem check.

If you’re using an NVMe M.2 SSD, this will still work:

So, it’s not all that difficult to find out when you did your last filesystem check.

Closure:

Careful observation may show you that the site has changed a little. There’s now a way to do sponsorship, seeing as I get asked so many times. Nobody ever follows through, but I have had some contact with a couple of agencies. You may start seeing sponsored content soon. Feel free to about sponsoring Linux-Tips if you want.

As for the article, it’s just another easy enough article. I hope I’ve distilled it down enough to make it approachable for even the newest Linux users. It may be good to check to see when you performed your last file system check. If you have data in cold storage, you may want to check that now and again and check your filesystem’s health once in a while. The goal is to prevent data loss through corruption and this should help with 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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

A Quick Look At The Cat Command

If you want to view the contents of a text file in Linux, you have something called the ‘cat’ command. Being able to use the cat command is important. This article will give you a quick look at the cat command. After all, this was written during the weekend and a quick article seems like a good idea.

It’s possible to view text in the terminal. Many files are just that, able to be read as text. This isn’t true for all files, of course. Trying to read a .tar.gz file as text is unlikely to be fruitful. On the other hand, a .sh file would be trivially read as plain text.

When you’re manipulating text in the terminal, you want a tool like Nano. When viewing text in the terminal, you can use a tool like the cat command. It’s a handy tool.

The cat Command:

You shouldn’t have to install anything. If you enter cat --version in the terminal, you’ll get an output like this:

As you can see, the cat command is a part of the GNU core utilities and, as such, should be installed on almost all Linux systems by default. This means you won’t need to install anything.

If you check the man page, with man cat, you’ll see that it’s described like so:

cat – concatenate files and print on the standard output

Other than the big word concatenate (which means to link files together), you can see that this is the correct tool for the job. What you type in is standard input and what comes out in the terminal is standard output. (That’s often referred to as stdin and stdout, respectively.)

As we’re going to be taking a quick look at the cat command, you might as well understand what it’s for and what it’s expected to do.

Using The cat Command:

As suggested above, this requires an open terminal. Press CTRL + ALT + T and your terminal should open. That’s not always true, but it’s true more often than not.

With your terminal now open, let’s start with something you should have – that is a ~/.bash_history file. If you don’t have a ~/.bash_history, pick a different text file that’s in your current directory (PWD) by using the ls command to search for such. You might have a ~/.bashrc for example.

Now, let’s just view that ~/.bash_history file in your terminal.

If you’re like me, that’s a great deal of text. You’ll need to scroll up to view all of the text, but the cat command is pretty helpful like this.

Let’s say you wanted to create a new file. You may want to read this article:

How To: Write Text To A File From The Terminal with “>” and “>>”

Using the information from that, you can use the cat command to create a new file with this command:

So, try the following:

You should see that there’s now a file named ‘foo’ in your PWD.

There’s a lot one can do with this cat command. You can show the contents of more than one file at a time, like so:

Using the same concepts from above, you can even use > or >> to take the output from cat and insert it into another file.

Finally, and cat has so much more to offer – but this is just a quick look – you can tell cat to number the lines in the output. For example:

See? Nice and easy! The cat command will happily show the output with line numbering enabled. This stuff is easy enough to commit to memory because the cat command is surprisingly powerful for such a little command.

Closure:

So, yeah… It’s a weekend. I have written some larger articles during the past few weeks. That means an easy day is always welcome. Don’t forget that you can make it easier on me by writing an article for the site! I do welcome contributions and it doesn’t matter much if it’s something I’ve already covered – so long as you do a better job than I did!

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.

Find A File While Ignoring Case Sensitivity

Today we’ll have a fairly short article as we’re simply discussing a way to find a file while ignoring case sensitivity. This can be a pretty handy command to have in your toolbox, so I’ll do what I can to turn this into an article. If you’re into finding files, especially with the terminal, you might just want to read this article!

I might even give you a bonus method! Maybe… It depends on how well you behave yourself! Don’t make me pull this car over!

Alright… Back on topic…

So, what is case sensitivity? We usually have lowercase files and commands. Linux is case-sensitive. If you type sudo APT update nothing is going to happen. Why? Because apt is lowercase. Similarly, a file named  FOO.bar is not the same as foo.bar.

If you try to perform an operation on a file with the wrong case, the operation will not take place. The file isn’t found, because you’ve used the wrong case. In the above command, not even SUDO apt update will work. You have to use lowercase.

Much of Linux is in lowercase. You can’t even use capital letters in your username, by default. Sure, you can force Linux to accept a bad username, but that’s not what the system is expecting.

So too are filenames. Well, mostly… Sometimes you will come across files that use mixed case or maybe all capital letters. You might even have created a file yourself with mixed case letters. When performing an operation on those files, you need to use the correct case.

Now, you can find files while ignoring the case. That’s what this article is all about accomplishing. It shouldn’t be too long.

The Find Command:

The find command is used in the terminal, so we will have to open the terminal to follow along with today’s article. However, on the plus side, you absolutely shouldn’t need to install anything. This find command should be available by default – unless you’re on an extremely stripped-down version of Linux.

If you check the man page, you’ll see that find is the right application for this.

find – search for files in a directory hierarchy

As we’re trying to find files (while ignoring case sensitivity) that seems like one of the good tools for the job – and it is.

Find A File While Ignoring Case Sensitivity:

As mentioned above, we do this in the terminal. More often than not, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. Otherwise, you can open your terminal via your application menu.

With your terminal now open, let’s change directories and create a file.

You can confirm that the file exists by running the ls command.

Next, try this command:

Unless you have another file with that name, you will not get any results from that command. That’s why you need the -iname flag. Simply add that to your command and you can find the file while ignoring case sensitivity.

So, in our case, it’d be:

Sure enough, that finds HeLLo.txt.

If you don’t feel like changing the directory, you can change the command up a bit. The syntax would look like this:

So, in our example:

And, sure enough, that finds the file while ignoring case sensitivity! 

Pretty neat and pretty easy, right?

How about that bonus?

Find A File While Ignoring Case Sensitivity (with locate):

You probably don’t have locate installed by default. You’ll need to install it.

To that end, read this previous article:

And Still Another Way To Find Files By Extension

Specifically this part is of interest (saving you a click):

With your terminal open, we can get mlocate installed with one of the following commands:

Debian/Ubuntu:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

OpenSUSE/GeckoLinux/etc:

There are other package managers. If your package manager isn’t covered, just go ahead and search for “mlocate” and you’ll likely find that it’s available by default.

So, with locate now installed, the syntax is also very simple. You simply need the -i flag to find files while ignoring case sensitivity.

First, we should update the locate database:

Next, try this command:

That will not find the file in your ~/Documents directory. Add the flag and run the command again, like so:

If you want to run that locate command in a specific directory, you can do that. The syntax is a little different than many other commands, but it’s easy enough.

Or, in our case, it’d look like this:

Sure enough, that outputs the information exactly as planned. It will happily ignore the case sensitivity and find your file named HeLLo.txt.

And now you’ve learned two ways to find a file while ignoring case sensitivity. One of the ways is even a nice bonus way to do accomplish this goal.

Closure:

As the headline and opening paragraph suggested, you can find a file while ignoring case sensitivity. It’s not particularly taxing and there are multiple ways to accomplish this goal. I figured I’d give some ‘bonus’ information with this one and share how to find a file while ignoring case sensitivity with the locate command used in the previous article. Why not?

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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