Tag: terminal

How To: Terminate A Terminal Command

Today’s article is going to be a very brief article, prompted by a question on one of the Linux support forums about how to terminate a terminal command. The poster got an answer, but it was the additional comments that made me realize how few people know how to properly terminate a terminal command – specifically new users.

So, if you want to learn how to terminate a terminal command, read on!

As I said, this isn’t going to be a very long article. I have actually covered this before in another article – but it kinda deserves its own page/article. It’s not a very long and detailed exercise, but it kind of got lost in the mix and I’m compelled to write this article.

I want to make sure that this information is easily found via search engines because the answers I saw to this question included things like ‘just wait’ or ‘start another terminal, just close that one’. None of those are the ‘right’ answer to the question. None of those are the proper way to terminate a terminal command. 

So, let’s see if I can turn this tiny command into a full article about…

How To Terminate A Terminal Command:

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.

Let’s use the ‘ping’ command as our tool of choice for this exercise. If you type in the following, you’ll continue pinging my site until you tell it to stop.

Of course, you can limit the number of pings you send. That’s easy enough. If you wanted to ‘ping’ linux-tips.us five times, you’d run this command:

The output of which looks similar to:

pinging this site just five times before stopping.
That’s how you properly limit the number of pings to linux-tips.us. Pretty easy, right!?!

But, you can run the first ‘ping’ command and just tell it to stop running whenever you want. The command to do so is:

CTRL + C

The output of this would look similar to this:

stopping a terminal command with ctrl + c
This stopped the command after five runs – but I personally stopped it with the CTRL + C option.

So, if you want to stop a running terminal command, it’s pretty easy. You just need to press CTRL + C on your keyboard and the process will stop. You will have terminated a terminal command the right way.

Note: You don’t always want to terminate processes. Things like terminating a device that’s in the process of upgrading may lead to an unstable condition. Then, for example, terminating a write operation may result in a loss of data.

Processes like that normally shouldn’t be stopped. In those cases, it’s best to just let the computer finish what it is doing – unless, of course, you do need to stop them because you have reasons to do so (like you started writing to the wrong device).

Closure:

Huh… I managed to kinda turn it into a full article, so there’s that. It really is a simple concept and the shortcut to terminate a terminal process is easy enough to remember. In an ideal world, this article will rank well in the search engines and save new Linux users time and effort. I’m not sure if I should aim for ‘terminate’ or ‘stop’, but this needs to be common knowledge – or more widely known than it seems to be at the present.

Also, just because you closed the terminal where you started the process doesn’t mean the process itself has necessarily ended. So, there’s something else to keep in mind. A process can and will happily keep executing even though you’ve closed the terminal. Linux is like that!

I wasn’t really sure that I could fluff this up into a complete article, but it appears that I’ve kinda pretended to do just that! Well, you’ll have another article in just a couple of days. It’ll probably be more involved than this one! This one is all about that CTRL + C function.

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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Pause And Unpause Your Terminal

Today, we’re going to learn how to pause and unpause your terminal. This will be one of the easiest articles I’ve ever written. It may also be one of the shortest! So, to learn how to pause and unpause your terminal, read on!

In fact, this information is so brief, I’m not quite sure how to turn it into a ‘full-fledged’ article. There’s really not all that much to it, but it’s information that should probably be on the site somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be here.

For many of us, we’ve learned that pressing CTRL + S will save whatever it is we’re working on. Well, that’s not the behavior you’ll see in the terminal – and from my testing, this appears pretty universal.

If you press CTRL + S  while in the terminal, which a new person may do by accident, it pauses the screen – making the screen appear as though it is locked. This can be confusing, especially to a new Linux user that’s not accustomed to using the terminal.

There’s no obvious way to unlock the screen. There’s no tooltip or anything like that involved, so a new person may just end up closing their terminal and opening a new one. You don’t have to close the terminal and start a new one.

Well, you can press CTRL + Q and that will unlock the screen. That’s really all there is to it – but there’s a caveat.

Pause And Unpause Your Terminal – CAVEAT:

Anything typed on the screen, any inputs entered in that terminal, will appear (and function) when you unpause the screen. This could be risky if someone has had access to the computer while you were away. Pausing the terminal in no way should be considered a security measure.

For example, press CTRL + S in an open terminal. Then type the following:

Next, press the ENTER button.

Finally, press CTRL + Q.

When you press that key combination, you’ll see that the ‘uptime’ command is going to be, and will be, executed. So, this isn’t even anything remotely secure. It’s useful for pausing when there’s a lot of information being fed to the terminal, and that’s about it. 

As far as I can tell, it’s more likely to be used by accident, tripping up new Linux users who may have hit the keys by accident or hit them thinking they’re saving something. 

Closure:

Well, that’s about as long as I can make this article without padding it for Google’s sake. It really doesn’t need to be longer than this to show you how to pause and unpause your terminal. It’s really just a simple matter to unpause the terminal without needing to open a new instance.

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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A Little About The ‘echo’ Command

That’s right, in today’s article we’re going to learn a little about the ‘echo’ command. We’ll barely be scratching the surface of the ‘echo’ command. There are so many ways to use ‘echo’ that we simply can’t fit it all into an article. Do, read on!

So, what is ‘echo’? Well, basically, the ‘echo’ command is a command that tells the computer to output text – be it in the terminal or using standard output to add that text to a file. It’s useful for regular people, but you’ll find it’s most commonly used in things like bash scripting

That sort of thing, scripting, is outside the scope of this article – and probably beyond the scope of the entire site. Maybe I’ll get to it, but those would end up being long articles, or articles written in parts. Besides, I’m not really all that good with scripting. (If you are good with scripting and would like to write some articles, do let me know.)

This is how the man page describes the ‘echo’ command:

echo – display a line of text

That’s indeed what it does. When you combine it with things like variables, you open up a whole new world. I don’t actually have a very good article about variables, other than existing variables. I should probably have said article.

Anyhow, we’ll just be scratching the surface of the ‘echo’ command. There are all sorts of ways to use ‘echo’, but we’re just going to use it in ways that a new Linux user might use it. Some basic familiarity is probably a good thing.

The ‘echo’ Command:

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. Otherwise, just open your terminal like you normally would.

So, how you start with this ‘echo’ command:

You can also add quotes, and in some cases probably should:

You can also use the > operand and echo the text to a file. Like so:

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

However, that’s not all you can do with the ‘echo’ command. You can also automatically fill in the information by way of environment variables. For example, try this:

Or you can try:

Read: How To: Show All Environment Variables

See? It’s good that I’ve written so many articles. I get to refer to ’em and save us all a bunch of time. So, be sure to visit those articles – especially if you’re a new user. If you’ve forgotten something, you can ‘echo’ the variable to be reminded.

Bonus:

This next bit is really just some information you’re gonna need down the road. I can sense it! This is a bit advanced for some of you, and you won’t need this until later in your Linux journey, but others will see this and suddenly understand the potential. If you’re new, you’ll get there.

The first thing we’re going to do is set a variable. It’s actually very easy to set your own variables in Linux. In this case, we’ll use:

Now, let’s just ‘echo’ the variable you just created:

Or, even better, you can then try:

See? It will output the variable when you echo it. You can create all the variables you’ll realistically ever need. 

You can actually format the output from the ‘echo’ command. For example, the -e flag with the \n separator. An example command looks like:

You can format the text in a variety of ways, just read the man page. You can do quite a lot with the ‘echo’ command and you should definitely check the man page if you’re interested in exploring all the possibilities:

There’s a ton of ways to use ‘echo’ (and with it variables) for those with a clever mind. When you do move on to learn about scripting, you’ll learn that it’s a basic tool used for all sorts of things, in all sorts of clever ways.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have a new article. This time, we’ve covered just the slightest bit of the ‘echo’ command. It’s enough to get your mind working, or so I hope. It’s enough to get a slight taste of the potential and to understand why you may want to be familiar with 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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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A Little About The ‘lspci’ Command

Today’s article is going to be another article where we get back to the basics, where we’ll learn a little about the ‘lspci’ command. As far as articles go, this one should be both fairly brief and easy to understand. To learn more about the ‘lspci’ command, read on! 

I am going to be writing some articles that cover the basics. I decided to not write them all at once, but to intersperse them with other articles. So far, we’ve had:

A Little About The ‘lsusb’ Command
A Little About The ‘lscpu’ Command

Well, this time around we’re going to cover ‘lspci’. 

So, what is ‘lspci’? We can find no better source than the man pages, which helpfully describe ‘lspci’ as:

lspci – list all PCI devices

Well, we see that it lists PCI devices, but what are those? PCI is another way hardware components talk with the CPU. If you have a fancy graphics card, it’s probably PCI-based (but likely PCI-X). If you’re really curious, PCI stands for “Peripheral Component Interconnect” but think of it as a way hardware can talk to the central processing unit.

So, the ‘lspci’ command will list things attached to the computer on the PCI bus. This is remarkably similar to the ‘lsusb’ command, though PCI can have a USB device attached to it through a hub.

Anyhow, that’s what PCI is and that’s what ‘lspci’ is meant to do. So, with that in mind, let’s just belly-flop into the article!

The ‘lspci’ Command:

You’ll find that ‘lspci’ is a terminal-based command. As such, you’ll have to have a terminal window open. If you don’t know how to open your default terminal emulator, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

We will not be covering everything that can be done with the ‘lspci’ command. We might have time and space (this time around), there’s really no reason to dive deeper into the ‘lspci’ command. We’re just going to cover the basics – because that’s all you’ll realistically have to worry about.

With your terminal now open, just run the command with no flags (but with sudo, ’cause ‘lspci’ wants elevated permissions to operate):

If you want a more verbose output, you can do that. Your choices are -v, -vv, and -vvv with ever-increasing amounts of verbosity. That can be pretty handy. Try this command to experience the most verbose output:

Where you might find the ‘lspci’ command most useful would be when you already know the class and category of information you want returned. When you use ‘lspci’ with ‘grep’, it gets more useful. For example, to learn about your memory:

See? It’s pretty straightforward. You’ll get this. I’m sure of it! (See 2nd edit below.)

As you can see, there’s quite a bit that you can do with the ‘lspci’ command. It’s a pretty handy command and we’ve just covered the ways you’re most likely to use ‘lspci’. 

EDIT: Fixed some information. I had somehow started to include lshw commands.
EDIT: So, this article was horribly written. Now it’s just short. I conflated ‘lspci’ with ‘lshw’ somehow – probably ’cause they’re next to each other in my notes. I’m just going to leave it as it is now.

Closure:

There it is, another new article! This time, we’re learning a little about the ‘lspci’ command. It’s a handy command to have learned, as you’ll eventually want to know about the hardware using the PCI bus. When that day does come, you’ll be able to use the command. Also, I’m ahead of schedule with pre-written articles.

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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Let’s Have Christmas In The Terminal

Today’s article is just another fun article. In this article, we’re going to learn how to have Christmas in the terminal. You won’t learn much of anything useful, but you may have some mild entertainment. Read on!

As you know, a lot of these articles are things you can do in a terminal. So, what’s better than making a Christmas tree in the terminal? It seems like a reasonable article to write, as today’s article will have been published on Christmas Day.

Not everyone who reads this site will be among those who celebrate Christmas. Personally, I’m an atheist that kinda appreciates the Buddhist philosophies. I celebrate Christmas as an excuse to share good times with friends and family, a chance to give back to those who have enriched my life.

So, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s fine. You don’t have to participate in this article. You could also just call it a Holiday Tree, I suppose. Hopefully you’ll use this opportunity to show your appreciation for those around you, even if you celebrate Festivus!

Alright, that’s enough ‘serious’ stuff for one article. Let’s just get into how to have Christmas in the terminal!

Christmas In The Terminal:

As the title implies, and like so many other articles, you’re gonna need an open terminal in order to have Christmas in the terminal. So, open your terminal of choice. 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, download a handy script to get started:

Next, we’ll make that file executable:

Now, we’ll run the program/execute the script:

The end result should look a whole lot like this:

That video should not autoplay. You’ll have to press the play button on your own. I too dislike any videos that webmasters deem should be automatically played. I assume you dislike that as well. So… You’re welcome!

Anyhow, there you have it… You have a Christmas tree in your terminal, just as the title suggested you would. Happy Holidays!

Closure and Some Thanks:

When I started this site, I was excited if I got twenty visitors in a single day. Well, the site has grown a whole lot since then. It has become an important part of my life and the thanks goes to you for reading, commenting, encouraging, providing feedback, etc… Without all that, I’d have never kept it up this long. So, thanks!

As for Christmas, I hope you’re all having a great day today. If you want to give me one gift, get offline (after rating the article, of course) and spend some time letting your friends and family know how much you appreciate them. It’s a good day to do so, even if you don’t particularly care for the holiday.

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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