How To: Show File Sizes When Listing Files In A Directory

Today we’re going to have an easy article that shows you how to show file sizes when listing files in a directory. It’s a simple set of commands and easy enough for a newbie to learn. Though the title is unwieldy, read on to learn how to show file sizes when listing files in a directory…

We’ll be using the ‘ls’ command for this exercise. Like normal, I’ll go ahead and suggest you read this page about why you shouldn’t parse the output from the ‘ls’ command. There are better ways and that link will explain it, and what you should consider, far better than I can.

Anyhow, the ‘ls’ command defines itself as:

ls – list directory contents

Of course, regular readers will recognize the ls command as we’ve used it numerous times before. Even though you shouldn’t parse the output from the command doesn’t mean it’s not still useful for a variety of other tasks.

Today, we’ll be exploring one of those tasks. We’re going to show you how to show file sizes when listing files in a directory – specifically with the ls command. Don’t worry, you won’t need to install anything. If you’re using any desktop Linux distro, the ls command is certainly available to you by default.

For the record, you should probably view the ls man page (run man ls in the terminal) to learn more about the command. It’s still a useful command – and I do sometimes parse the output from the command, but only when nobody is looking and when the output isn’t all that vital. I use grep with the ls command almost every day! Shh!!!

Show File Sizes When Listing Files In A Directory:

(That’s an unwieldy title!)

Anyhow, it’s the ls command. That’s a terminal-based command. So, of course, you’re going to need an open terminal (like so many of these articles). Press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. Tada!

With your terminal now open, we can just use your home folder. To run the basic ls command, it’s just that:

Now, to show file sizes when listing files in a directory, you’d start with the -s flag:

You may find the output from that command is relatively useless without doing a bit of math to go along with it. Fortunately, you can tell the command to show the file size in a ‘human-readable format’. To do that, you’d run this command with the -h flag:

Now, if you wanted to show all the files, including the hidden files in that directory, you’d just add the -a flag. The command would look like this:

And if I was a Linux newbie, that’s the command I’d commit to memory. It doesn’t make a mess. The output is still plenty clear. It’s easy to understand. It’s easy to remember and turn into a habit. This way, when you ran the ls command, you just default to using -ash flags.

If you don’t want columns (and some do not), and you want more information such as file permissions or ownership values, you can just add an -lflag to the above. That’d look like:

So, it’s up to you…

You can remember ‘ash’ or you can remember ‘lash’. You can also not remember either and ignore the flags completely, but I find developing a habit is a good way to remember things. It’s your device, you do what you want!

Closure:

There you have it! You have another article. This one was simple enough and I hope you found it useful. If you’re new and running the ls command is new to you, it’s worth learning some additional flags and gathering more information at a glance. That’s why there’s this relatively simple article that shows you how to show file sizes when listing files in a directory.

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.

Get Some System Information With Archey

Today’s article will be a fun one, where we figure out how to get some system information with Archey. It’s a mostly unnecessary article and Archey is definitely replicating work done elsewhere, but it’ll be fun!

Well, I think it’ll be fun…

I suppose you can decide that for yourself as you read the article. If you want to get some system information with Archey, read on (and maybe have fun)!

As regular readers might know, I’ve covered a variety of *fetch articles.

How To: Display System Information With screenFetch
Screenfetch vs. Neofetch, You Decide!
Show RAM Information With Ramfetch
Get Some Prettified CPU Information in Your Terminal With ‘CPUFETCH’

In fact, the ‘Screenfetch vs. Neofetch’ article is oddly one of the most searched articles on the site, at least from Google’s traffic.

Anyhow, Archey is like those (but written in Python, if that matters). If I understand correctly, it was Archey4 – a maintained fork of Archey. The original Archey project ceased development and now this project is just called Archey as it is no longer a fork but is the actual project.

I think I’m understanding that properly. If I’m not, hopefully, someone chimes in and lets me know the full story. Often my articles are visited by project leaders, so maybe that’ll happen in this instance and someone will set the story straight.

Either way, it doesn’t matter much – but it does explain why I’m simply referring to the project as ‘Archey’. If you check the man page, you’ll learn that Archey describes itself like:

A simple system information tool written in Python

Got it? Good! Let’s get started getting some system information with Archey!

Let’s Get System Information With Archey:

So, the first thing you’re going to need is a copy of Archey. That’s easily accomplished if you want .deb or .rpm. There are some odds that you’ll find it’s already in your repositories (like Arch or BSD). You can also use “pip” (Python packages from PyPI) to install Archey. There’s even a ‘homebrew’ version for Mac users.

Otherwise, if none of those will work for you, you might find you need the source code to build and install Archey.

This link should take you to the current release:

https://github.com/HorlogeSkynet/archey4/releases/latest

From there you can install Archey. Due to the huge variety of installation methods, I’m just going to tell you to follow the directions to install Archey. If you can’t get it installed, you can always ask for help and someone will hopefully get you sorted.

Once you have Archy installed, you can start getting system information with Archey. You just run the archey command and it’ll spit out something like this:

Achey displays system information.
I don’t think you’ll need me to explain. The screenshot should be adequate.

As you can see, Archey’s output is fairly normal. It likely reminds you of things we’ve already covered in earlier articles. That’s okay – it should remind you of things like Screenfetch and Neofetch.

Just like some of the other previously covered *fetch applications, you can take a screenshot automatically. After all, the goal of these applications is to give you some information that si easily captured as a screenshot so that you can show it off to your forum buddies.

However, possibly because I have Flameshot installed (which seems to have taken over the ‘screenshot’ command that Archey uses), I am unable to actually verify the screenshot bit. I dutifully took the screenshot with Shutter. But, the -s flag should work for other people. I tried a few times with Archey but got conflicting errors. Someone smarter than I probably have this sorted out.

I’m not going to go uninstalling stuff just to demonstrate it. If it doesn’t work for you, file a bug at the above-linked GitHub site. Also, you have some additional options with Archey. There’s nothing too fancy, but be sure to check the man page (by using man archey) to learn more about the application.

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article. This article covers how to get system information with Archey. It’s an easy and, likely, familiar task. If you’ve followed along, you’ve learned all sorts of ways to get system information.

Do you really need Archey? No, probably not… I figured I’d cover it because my site shows up in some Archey queries. If people are looking for it, it might as well be here. That’s my line of thinking, at any rate.

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 Find A Site’s MX Records

Today’s article is going to be rather specific and brief, as we learn how to find a site’s MX records. This isn’t something everyone is going to need to know, but it’s useful for debugging an email issue when you’re hosting websites. So, some folks are going to find it useful – and will then know how to find a site’s MX records. Read on!

I suppose most of my readers will not know what an MX record is…

In short, an MX (Mail Exchange) record is another DNS (Domain Name System) record. In this case, it is used to route emails to the correct server (via the IP address, basically). From there, your server will route the emails to individual email inboxes.

Basically, you want to know this information when things go pear-shaped with your emails or maybe when you’re using a 3rd party email service provider. There are reasons why people will want this information, they will want to find a site’s MX records.

Additionally, I figured I’d do this article now while ‘dig’ is still fresh in our memory. After all, I’ve used dig in the previous two articles and this is the final dig-related topic that I can think of. Here are the previous two articles, if you’re not reading these articles in order and are unfamiliar with the dig command:

How To: Find A Website’s IP Address
How To: Find A Site’s Nameservers

So, with all that in mind, let’s learn how to find a site’s MX records!

How To Find A Site’s MX Records:

Yes, dig is run in the terminal. Yes, you’ll need an open terminal to follow along. 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, the syntax for this specific dig command is:

For example, you’d find this site’s MX records with:

If you want, as the other dig commands used recently, you can use the +short flag with this, like so:

The output should look like this:

using the dig command to find a site's MX records
There, you can see this site’s MX records. This is public information. So, gawk away!

You can have more than one MX record, should you want failover but the mail protocol already includes some efforts to resend mail when there’s an outage. That’s irrelevant here, but information that I might as well share.

Also, like the other dig commands covered, you can put the flags at the end, like so:

So, that’s an option. I’m not sure why it’s an option. If anyone has a clue as to why it’s an option, do feel free to share. Heck, even if it’s a wild guess, I’ll take it. But, if you want more information about the dig command, run man dig in your terminal.

Closure:

There you have it, it’s another article. I think this is the last dig article, but who knows? This time around, we’ve learned how to find a domain’s MX records. For those that need to know, this will be handy.

For everyone else, you’ll likely forget this by tomorrow – and that’s okay. You don’t have to carry all the tools in your toolbox. If you tried, you’d need a very big toolbox and it’d be hard to carry it!

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.

How To: Find A Site’s Nameservers

Today’s article will be a fun and easy one if you already understand nameservers, as I will be explaining how to find a site’s nameservers. If you don’t understand nameservers, it may be a bit more difficult. But, I’ll do my best to make it approachable. So, to learn how to find a site’s nameservers read on!

Okay, so what are nameservers?

Hmm… Let’s try to explain it in the most simple way possible… 

DNS is like a phone book. You look in the book to see which number (IP address) to connect to. However, just like in the real world (though less common with cell phones) a given telephone number may belong to multiple people.

Nameservers help to organize those DNS records. Using the nameservers is sort of like calling a phone exchange and then entering a party’s extension number to go directly to that person.

Does that make sense? No? Well, that’s the best you’re getting. I suck at analogies unless they’re automotive-related and I can’t come up with one that makes sense. I’m pretty sure the above was how it was first explained to me, or something like that. Ah well…

It should be pointed out that I used ‘dig’ in the previous article. We’ll be using that again. This time, we’ll be using dig to find a site’s nameservers instead of the site’s IP address. We might as well learn about it now, while the dig command is fresh in our memories!

Find A Site’s Nameservers:

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 now open, the syntax for finding a site’s nameservers is as follows:

Or, if you prefer a shorter output, you have:

Like the previously used dig command, you can actually put the flags at the end (if that’s something you feel like doing). It works just fine like:

If we use this site as an example, the outcome of the latter command should look something like this:

using dig to find a site's nameservers
And there you see them, this site’s nameservers as shown by dig. Pretty easy, huh?

As you can see, nameservers look just like domain names. You’ll also note that those (shouldn’t) don’t change, unlike the site’s IP address. As we’re using a CDN, there are a number of possible IP addresses. The nameservers will be the same no matter what part of the globe you connect from.

Of course, there’s more to the dig command. We’ve just touched on a couple of uses. Check the man page with man dig to find out what other options are available.

Closure:

Well, there you have another article. Once again, we’ve used dig in this article. I figured we might as well have another dig article while I was thinking about it, and this time we used dig to find a site’s nameservers. Hopefully, this will be useful for you at some point in your Linux journey. As I deal with a bunch of websites, it’s important for me to know my nameservers and to know when they’ve propagated (something for another article).

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: Find A Website’s IP Address

Today’s article should be interesting, as we learn how to find a website’s IP address. There’s more than one way to do this sort of thing, so I’ll just be showing you the one way to do so. I want to keep it relatively short and simple. So, to find out how to find a website’s IP address, read on!

I have a reason to keep this one short and simple. I’m in the midst of a blizzard and am likely to lose my connection at some point this evening. That’s okay, I love the cold and snow. As for me and my house, I’ve got solar and wind. I won’t want for anything. I’ve been out playing in the snow already. I’ll go back out shortly.

So, let’s say you want to know the IP address of your favorite website. That’s easy enough to learn. Though it may surprise you that your favorite website might have multiple IP addresses. That’d often be because many websites have multiple nameservers pointing at them for a bit of redundancy.

We’ll be using the ‘dig’ tool. This is likely installed by default. You shouldn’t need to install anything. The dig command defines itself as:

dig – DNS lookup utility

That’s what we’ll be using to find a website’s IP address, as it’s a fine tool for doing so. With that said, let’s just jump into the article…

Find A Website’s IP Address:

If you’re a regular reader, you know that it’s probably time to open a terminal. Like many articles, this one requires an open terminal, as that’s where you use the dig command. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, we’ll use Linux Tips as our example:

The output of which should look like this:

using dig to find a website's ip address
You’d be looking for the answer section, as indicated in the graphic. Pretty easy, huh?

As you can see, the answer section is what you’re looking for. The IP addresses are on the right. As you can see, this site has two IP addresses – both of which belong to my CDN (if you’re curious).

You can save some time and space… Well, some space. I suppose it may take you a second or so longer to type out the extra characters. But, give it a try with the +short flag (placed in a weird spot).

The output from that command is a bit easier and more concise:

using +short is a neater output to find a website's ip address.
That’s a bit easier and contains just the information you’re looking for. You can just use that.

You can use either or both, depending on what you’re after. I suppose it’s technically a bit longer when you type in the last command, but your output is just the information you’ve been looking for.

By the way, dig +short linux-tips.us will work, I just learned it the other way, so that’s how it is situated in my notes. If you’re feeling weird about placing the flag at the end of the command, just place it where flags normally go. Also, don’t forget to check the man page with man dig for more information about the dig command.

Closure:

And there you have it, you have another article! This time we’ve covered how to find a website’s IP address. If the site has a dedicated IP address, you can use that IP address to connect to the site, as opposed to using the domain name. So, there’s 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.

Linux Tips
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.