Tips Archives • Page 59 of 66 • Linux Tips

Find Your Network Interface Name

There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to know your network interface name. It comes in handy with things like ‘vnstat‘, for example. In fact, I wrote an article about changing the network interface name. (There’s sometimes a reason why I write articles in the order I write ’em!)

Like I said, you may want to know this information for other purposes. In your general day-to-day computing, the network interface name is entirely unimportant. As you’ve seen from previous articles, it may come to pass that you need to know the name and this article will explain how to find that.

Anyhow, this one is quick and easy. I’m just going to show you some easy ways to find your network interface name. This should be pretty brief and simple enough.

Your Network Interface Name:

Like oh so many articles, this too requires an open terminal. Sure, there are GUI methods to find your network interface name, but we might as well do it in the terminal. So, use your keyboard and press CTRL + ALT + T. With your terminal open, you can start with:

ip -c link show

1	ip -c link show

With any luck, this should be enough. You’ll get something that looks like this:

network interface name — See the handy arrow? That’ll help! That’s the network interface that’s up and connected.

As you can see by the arrow, that’ll clue you into which connection is in use at the time. If that doesn’t work, you can also try this command:

sudo lshw -class network -short

1	sudo lshw -class network -short

The output from this will look similar to this:

lshw showing network interface names — A keen eye will note that there are multiple devices listed!

As you can see, that’s from a different device with a different operating system. It also relies on ‘lshw’ which you may or may not have access to.

You can also try:

ip -br -c link show
ifconfig -a
ip a
ip addr
ip link show

ip -br -c link show

ifconfig -a

ip a

ip addr

ip link show

Some of those commands will show the ‘lo’ connection, which is just a loopback connection and immaterial for this purpose. You can safely ignore that.

Anyhow, those will show you your network interface names. If you have more than one, it’ll happily show them all – and give you a clue as to which one is up. If you have both connected, say wireless and wired, then it will say both are up. This information isn’t very useful by itself, but it is useful for other purposes.

There are other ways, so feel free to leave a comment showing how you find your network interface name.

Closure:

See? I told you this one would be quick and easy. There’s not much to it, but it’s a useful bit of information to know and now you know that this is how you find your network interface name. It’s not much of an article, but it’s yet another in what’s hopefully a long list of ’em! They can’t all be huge pieces!

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 ShellCheck So That You Can Use It Locally

If you’ve been writing shell scripts, or if you’re new to writing scripts, you may not know of ShellCheck – and you that can install ShellCheck for use locally. This means you don’t need to go online to check your shell scripts, saving you time and effort – as well as being available offline.

If you don’t already know of ShellCheck, march your ass over there right this minute! It’s one of the greatest tools on the internet. If you’ve already read the whole linked page, you can pretty much skip this entire article! After all, it tells you how to install ShellCheck over there – and I’ll be duplicating a lot of that here.

Why am I duplicating it? Because so few people seem aware of it. So few people know this tool exists, even for online use. Time and time again, I see scripting questions that can be debugged/resolved using this wonderful ShellCheck tool.

So, like many of the articles on this site, it’s here so that we can link to this article and not have to repeat ourselves time and time again. Like much of the site, it’s meant to save time and to avoid duplicating effort!

There are other ways to use ShellCheck, such as directly in your editor. This article will not be covering those other ways, I’m simply going to tell you how to install it and use it from your terminal.

Install ShellCheck For Local Use:

Like so many of these things, you need to start with an open terminal. To do so, use your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. If it doesn’t, just open it from your application menu.

Once you have the terminal open, you can install ShellCheck. It’s available in most default repositories, so you shouldn’t have any issues installing it.

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install shellcheck

1	sudo apt install shellcheck

Arch/Manjaro:

pacman -S shellcheck

1	pacman -S shellcheck

Fedora:

dnf install ShellCheck

1	dnf install ShellCheck

OpenSUSE:

dnf install ShellCheck

1	dnf install ShellCheck

One of those ought to work. If not, follow the link in the second paragraph, poke around, and you’ll see that you can likely get ShellCheck installed with little or no difficulty. Worst case, you can grab the binaries and install it manually.

Using ShellCheck is even easier. You just use ‘shellcheck’ and then the path to the script. So, it’d look something like one of the following:

shellcheck ~/Documents/script.sh
shellcheck /path/to/script
shellcheck ../path/to/script

shellcheck ~/Documents/script.sh

shellcheck /path/to/script

shellcheck ../path/to/script

It’s really that easy. ShellCheck isn’t perfect and it doesn’t recognize every error, but it’ll catch a ton of beginner mistakes and typos. It’ll catch syntax issues and punctuation mistakes. It’s pretty handy and is absolutely a great tool for anyone that does any scripting at all.

Closure:

And there’s another article! This one will help you install ShellCheck, a fantastic tool for people who need to check their scripts. It’s right there in the application’s title! Really, more people need to be aware that it exists, and hopefully this article does a little something to help raise awareness.

Don’t Let Applications Close When The Terminal Is Closed

You may have started an application from the terminal and noticed that those applications close when the terminal is closed. This article will help you stop that behavior. This should be a pretty basic and speedy article.

Let’s explain what I mean with a demonstration. First, open your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. Now, enter the following:

pcmanfm-qt

1	pcmanfm-qt

Change the ‘pcmanfm-qt’ to the file manager you use, like ‘nemo’, ‘spacefm‘, or whatever it is you use to manage files in a graphical way. Any one will do.

Now, close the terminal that you used to open your file manager or application. When you do so, you’ll see that applications close when the terminal is closed. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Enter ‘nohup‘, a lovely tool that will let you open applications in the terminal and then make sure that those applications don’t close when the terminal is closed. The ‘nohup’ application should be installed by default on any major distro and the man page describes it like:

nohup – run a command immune to hangups, with output to a non-tty

If you check the man page, you’ll see that it has pretty much no useful flags other than help and version. So, straight away you’ll see that it’s a pretty easy application to work with.

And, with that ease in mind, I’m just gonna go straight into telling you how to use it.

Applications Close When The Terminal Is Closed:

Seeing as you already opened the terminal, let’s not mess about and just show you some uses of ‘nohup’. Let’s say you use ‘nemo’ as your file manager:

nohup nemo ~/Downloads

1	nohup nemo ~/Downloads

Now close the terminal. See? When you use ‘nohup’ you’ll not have applications close when the terminal is closed.

You may see the command used with an ampersand (“&”) symbol at various tutorial sites. What that does is it runs things in the background. This means it should immediately return to the command prompt after the application has opened. This only works if you’re using bash, by the way. If you use it, it looks something like this:

nohup nemo ~/Documents &

1	nohup nemo ~/Documents &

Anyhow, after you’ve used ‘nohup’ to open an application without the ampersand, you can also just press CTRL + C and disconnect the running application from the terminal while returning you to the command prompt. Later, when you close the terminal, you’ll find see that no longer do those applications close when the terminal is closed.

That’s about it, really. I don’t see any reason to stretch this article out by adding fluff. You’re welcome!

Closure:

There ya have it. Another article. This one will help you change the behavior, if you don’t want to have applications close when the terminal is closed.

Customize Your GNOME Desktop With GNOME-Tweak-Tool In Ubuntu

The GNOME-tweak-tool is a valuable tool to modify and manage your GNOME desktop environment. The application is easily installed, easily used, and generally safe to use. This article will help you get the tweak tool installed and explain why you might want to do so.

If you know about it already, you may know it as ‘Tweaks‘, it’s current name. I’ve chosen to use the older name for search reasons. I want to cover the tool not just for new users, but also for older users who may need a reminder. Doing it this way should cover all the bases, though my SEO “skills” are still in the ‘wing it’ phase. Plus, see the installation command below.

I don’t cover GNOME very often. Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan. However, I’d be overlooking a large number of users if it wasn’t mentioned from time to time. GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, though that was dropped when the focus of the project changed. It’s one of the more popular desktop environment options out there, and is a default for a number of distros – including Ubuntu.

With GNOME comes a lot of support resources, as it is so widely used, and even has the ability to use extensions. It’s a weighty desktop with a number of great features that are beyond the scope of this article. People sometimes complain about how GNOME does things, and the lack of easy customization, but when you use GNOME you’re buying into the entire GNOME philosophy. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

But, we’re Linux users. If there’s one thing we have (just shy of universally) in common across the board, it is that we like to customize our experience. We like to tinker and to make things our own. Well, GNOME-tweak-tool will help you with that. It’ll help you make the GNOME desktop your own.

Install GNOME-tweak-tool:

The GNOME-tweak-tool should be available for any distro that’s using GNOME as its desktop environment. You don’t want to try using the tweak-tool while using a different desktop environment, even if that desktop environment is based on GNOME.

For the sake of this exercise, we’ll assume you’re using Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, you’ll need the Universe repository enabled. You may have that enabled already, but you can check under “Software Sources” easily enough. It’d look like this:

software sources, universe enabled — See? You can just click a button to do this! Nice and easy!

Once you have the correct software source (repository) enabled, you can go ahead and get the GNOME-tweak-tool installed easily enough. Crack open your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T and then enter:

sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool

1	sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool

That should install the tool and make it available in your menu. To find it in your application menu, you can search visually or just type “tweak” and it will narrow the results down to show you just the application.

If you’re using a different distro, one not based on Ubuntu, you’ll need to adjust the installation command. If you use dnf or zypper, you’ll need to adjust the command to suit those package managers. While this article specifically covers Ubuntu, it should be easy to do this with other distros as well.

Why The GNOME-tweak-tool:

The GNOME-tweak-tool actually does a bunch of things and is full of options. I’ll go ahead and list some of the options and, seeing as I’m looking at an Ubuntu VM as I write this, I might as well go in order.

Change animations and suspend when closing your laptop’s lid.
Change application themes, background images, icons, etc.
Add/remove desktop items, app indicators, or a dock.
Adjust system-wide fonts.
Change keyboard and mouse settings, disable touchpad while typing.
Add/remove startup applications.
Change the top bar, maybe adding/removing battery monitor, etc.
Change titlebar actions and buttons.
Modify window behavior, including click and focus actions.
Modify workspaces, adding and removing them.

As you can see, there are quite a few tweaks available and they’re all available in a single place. Some of those settings may be in other places, but this puts them all into one place. The GNOME-tweak-tool is a pretty decent way to customize your GNOME desktop environment, an easy way to make it your own.

If you’re a GNOME user, this may well be just the tool you’re looking for. New users are often exposed to Linux with GNOME as their first desktop. If you’re one of those people, you’ll likely enjoy this chance to customize your experience.

Closure:

There you have it! It’s an article about GNOME-tweak-tools. As y’all know, and as mentioned above, I don’t particularly like GNOME. It’s just not my cup of tea and I don’t fit well in the whole ‘GNOME experience’. And, you know, that’s okay. We don’t all have to agree. If we did, there’d only be a single DE to pick from. We don’t want that.

How To: Graphically Check Your Logs For Errors With ‘KSystemLog’

Today’s article is going to be about one of my favorite tools for checking the various system logs, KSystemLog. Checking your logs for errors has never been easier, and this is one of the first tools I reach for when I have a problem that I don’t know how to solve.

When you first notice a problem with your Linux box, you might only be noticing the symptoms and not actually seeing the reason. Those reasons can often be found by rooting through the various logs to see what’s actually causing the error.

Back in the early computing days it required the terminal to work with your system’s logs. You’d ask for help on a forum and they’d request that you run a command that looked something like this:

grep -i "Feb 10" /var/log/*.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

1	grep -i "Feb 10" /var/log/*.log \| sort \| uniq -c \| sort -n

It that actually worked and it worked well enough for a long time. It worked even better when you knew what you were looking for and looking at. If you didn’t, you’d scroll through tons of text in the terminal with no real visual cues to sort through the data. Today, there are better tools for this.

Enter KSystemLog:

Thankfully, there’s KSystemLog. KSystemLog’s man page describes it thusly:

Description: system log viewer
KSystemLog show all logs of your system, grouped by General (Default system log, Authentication, Kernel, X.org…), and optional Services (Apache, Cups,etc, …).
It includes many features to read nicely your log files:
* Colorize log lines depending on their severities
* Tabbed view to allow displaying several logs at the same time
* Auto display new lines logged
* Detailed information for each log lines

Which looks like this:

As you see in the image, KSystemLog is a handy GUI that lets view your various system logs. When you look at the image above, you’ll be able see that one of the lines is a darker blue than the previous lines. This is because it’s a new entry, an event that happened after the application had been opened.

That means you can open KSystemLog and then open the application that’s giving you trouble. Doing it this way will let you see what log entries are made and what errors are thrown as the application is opened and used. Of course, you can always examine the entire log of errors and events.

Even better, the events in the logs can be color-coded, providing easy visual cues. The events range in color, indicating severity, of from a light gray (normal) to a bright red for emergency-level events. You can even filter and search for events.

error messages in kystemlog — Note the color change for errors.

KSystemLog is a KDE application but pulls in very, very few dependencies. It starts rapidly and will show the installed log files by default. In a pretty default configuration, it finds these:

ksystemlog logs available — Currently available logs on this system. More are available.

Getting KSystemLog:

Assuming you are using a major distro, it’s almost certain to be your default repositories. For example, if you’re using a Debian derivative (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) then it can be installed by opening the terminal and entering:

sudo apt install ksystemlog -y

1	sudo apt install ksystemlog -y

Just adjust the above installation command for your distro’s package manager and you should be good to go. If KDE is an option for your distro, then KSystemLog can’t be far behind.

By the way, you don’t have to know what the errors mean. You can just take the logged errors and use them as search terms to help. Just copy and paste, using the errors verbatim, and search! It’s absolutely amazing how many errors can be resolved by doing just that. I’ve personally used this method to troubleshoot so many times that I’ve decided that it’s a tool we all need in our Linux toolbox.

Closure:

And there you have it, another article. This one is about KSystemLog, a tool that lets you graphically examine your system’s logs. It’s a great tool for wading through long logs and searching for the root cause of various problems. In an ideal world you’d not need such a tool, but this is not an ideal world. It’s a world with bugs and errors, and KSystemLog is a tool for just that.