Hi!

After my migration from Windows to Linux two or so months ago, I've been trying to learn how to use the terminal and be somewhat efficient and know about the basic functions like rm, mv, cp, ls, ln and such.
I've known about terminal aliases a while, but I found out about abbreviations on Fish yesterday and I absolutely love that feature.

Got any suggestions on other abbreviations/aliases I should use, or even other QoL features that I might not know about? Happy to learn!

I am running the latest version of mint on an old macbook. I feel like this should be working but I also feel like I’m missing something critical or maybe I’m just dumb. I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’m pretty new to linux overall.

Is it just out of habit, or because POSIX is such a big deal?

I never broke a Linux Distro in my Life and i used Distros like Arch. What do people try to do when they break a linux distro because i feel like i miss the classic Linux Feeling and want to learn more about Linux.

Have been using linux for more than 3 years but now wanna learn something more and new, starting with CLI, wanna see what's your fav shell command that is super helpful for you always.

What’s your favorite shell command? What do you usually use as a developer or even just for normal stuff? I mostly just use cd and ls, nothing fancy. What about you guys?

Like all of you, I grew up on Windows.

But in my day, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was king.

Yes, I am that old.

The GUI was fun to use, but MS-DOS 6.22 was infinitely faster and once you memorized the command variables you could fly across that keyboard like a true DOS Warrior. I spent all of my time in a full screen command window and only went into the GUI when I had to.

Here is my DOS to Linux alias list that I made and use every day...

Paste the following at the end of your .bashrc file which is located in your home directory.

# --- DOS WARRIOR ALIASES ---

# --- Directory & File Navigation ---

alias dir="ls -laF --color=auto"

alias ..="cd .."

alias ...="cd ../.."

alias ....="cd ../../.."

alias md="mkdir -pv"

alias rd="rmdir -v"

alias pu="pushd"

alias po="popd"

# --- File Operations (Safe & Verbose) ---

# -i = Interactive (ask before overwrite), -v = Verbose (show action)

alias copy="cp -iv"

alias move="mv -iv"

alias ren="mv -iv"

alias del="rm -iv"

alias erase="rm -iv"

# --- New File Actions ---

alias create="touch"

alias display="cat"

alias view="cat"

alias edit="nano"

# --- System & Utilities ---

alias cls="clear"

alias sysinfo="uname -a"

alias mem="free -h"

alias cpu="lscpu"

alias disk="df -h"

alias usage="du -sh *"

alias proc="ps auxf"

alias diffcmd="diff"

# --- ATTRIB Emulation ---

alias attrib="ls -l"

alias attrib+r="chmod -v a-w"

alias attrib-r="chmod -v u+w"

# --- Search & Paging ---

alias search="grep --color=auto"

alias more="less"

# --- Safety & Misc ---

alias del.="echo \"Error: Use del [filename] to delete files safely.\""

alias backup="cp --backup=numbered"

# - NOTE: In terminal type: source ~/.bashrc to system reload the file

If you would like to see my BASH Warrior Alias list please goto https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1uad462/calling_all_bash_warriors/

Hi everyone, I would like to write a simple start-up script in Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.3 64-bit. The reason I would like to write the start-up script is to automatically change settings for my sound card that always selects the wrong output, which then requires me to manually change through the terminal. My sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster AE-7. Here is what I would like the start-up script to do:

1. Open terminal

2. Type " alsamixer "

3. Press enter

4. Press F6

5. Arrow key down one space to select “ default:0 HDA Creative ”

6. Press enter

7. Right arrow key 26 times until it lands on “ <Output S> “ which displays Headphones

8. Arrow key down once to display “ Speakers “

9. Press the escape key

10. exit terminal

Would anyone be willing to offer advice as to how I could go about doing this?

I want to be a freelance linux server-expert/troublehsooter and while I'm good at linux i want to improve quickly and faster so I can get experience in linux and get a career of some sort faster.

I know I may have to use the GUI for linux sometimes (at least to start) but would transitioning to useing the terminal lik 90% times more be better? I'm using a vm to test things out and learn things so I don't damage my main OS (Pop_os!). Im learning the syntax for Debian, UBuntu, Arch and hopefullt RedHat soon.

Any thoughts?

I’ve just released NewBe 0.1.0, a free and open-source GNOME desktop experience inspired by one question:

What might BeOS look and feel like if it had continued to evolve into a modern desktop workstation?

NewBe is not a conventional retro theme or a pixel-for-pixel BeOS recreation. It follows current GNOME visual conventions—modern proportions, restrained decoration, symbolic icon behavior, clear focus states, and the existing GNOME workflow—while introducing its own materials, dimensional icons, warm-gold palette, and evolved BeOS character. The goal is to give GNOME a distinct identity without fighting the underlying desktop.

NewBe is Wayland-first and was developed and live-tested on Fedora Workstation 44 with GNOME 50. It includes:

• Light and dark GTK 3/GTK 4 themes
• GNOME Shell styling
• A complete NewBe icon theme with 100% coverage of its defined core set
• A custom HiDPI cursor theme
• Seven original wallpapers with GNOME Background integration
• An optional GNOME Shell extension
• User-local installation and uninstallation
• Dry-run, audit, accessibility, and verification tooling
• Reproducible, checksum-verified release archives

The installer does not require root access, modify system files, automatically change your GNOME settings, or download and execute remote code.

One honest limitation: many libadwaita applications retain their upstream Adwaita styling. The icons, cursors, wallpapers, Shell theme, and extension remain usable independently.

If the aesthetic interests you, the GitHub page has the screenshots, source, installation instructions, compatibility details, checksums, and full design philosophy:

GitHub: https://github.com/infamous-pattern/NewBe
Version 0.1.0: https://github.com/infamous-pattern/NewBe/releases/tag/v0.1.0

I’d love feedback, compatibility reports, contributions, and screenshots—particularly from Ubuntu and other GNOME-based distributions.

I want to know what custom commands/scripts you guys made that you think made a diffrence to your experience with linux or saved alot of effort for you, or even for fun, anything, i just want to hear you guys' projects and ideas

I'm trying to style my terminal so I installed fastfetch and trying out base presets.

I reallly liked this one with Rey but after using it I can't see my l beam. can I fix it or should I just choose / make other config?

The two first images was e deleting the redundant line, seeing that it had matched with the top two ones. Yet, I am still getting a "configured multiple times" warning when using apt update. Am I missing something?

Hardware: Thinkpad T410 Intel i5

Software: Debian 12 KDE Plasma 6

So I use that command on the CLI to see the size of folders, but is it also possible to add a flag that sorts them from low to high in folder size (or vice versa)?

Hi !

I'm using PikaOS (debian based) and I'm trying to write a small simple script for updating my packages. I don't know how to since I'm new into linux and even newer on scripting

What I want it to do :

1- launch a terminal
2- display a prompt that asks me if I backed up my files (currently using timeshift, when I'm more used to CLI maybe I will automate backups in that script)
3- If no, echo something like "Do it then"
3b- If yes, go on
4- update system packages (using pikman upgrade ; equivalent of sudo apt update && upgrade)
5- update flatpak packages

Ideally I would like 4 and 5 to execute at the same time with a single command, but if not possible, then do it one after the other.

What I have currently :

#!/bin/bash

#Launch terminal to update and upgrade 
x-terminal-emulator --hold -e pikman upgrade

I'm launching this script from a button of a widget.

PS : When I launch the scrip like this, there is no user@host:~$ like when I launch an empty terminal. So I'm never sure when the script is finished. Is there a way to have that too ?

I'm trying to iterate over every directory and find every mp3 file to later change it to ogg, but I can't get shell script to work the way I want. If I use command for c in $(find -name *.mp3); do echo $c; done then directories that contain white space are printed in 2 parts

For example I get

./bass
drum/whatever1.mp3
./bass
drum/whatever2.mp3

But I want

./bass drum/whatever1.mp3
./bass drum/whatever2.mp3

How can I do that?

Like, I have windows on my HDD. The thing is, this HDD is old and is MBR. I can run Linux off if via uefi, but the windows partition has to be booted via the bios boot menu, problem is. Ppl in my house dunno about that. So I decided to add windows MbR to grub.

Thing is. Idk how;

(Distro is Manjaro, both of them are on the same drive. sda2 is the windows MBR, sda3 is Linux uefi. Windows is on sda5, Linux is on sda8)

Im a New Linux user, I downloaded Arch manually (albeit with a youtube guide). And was interested in shells and scripting, so I started getting into it. My question is when should I use sudo and when should I not use sudo Any help is appreciated!!

I need to clean up the metadata of my music collection. Specifically, I need to add an albumartist tag to all of the files. Ideally, I would prefer to only add them to files that do not already have them.

On an artist by artist basis, I can do this manually.

find ./Soapy\ Argyle/ -type f -name "*.flac" -exec metaflac --set-tag="ALBUMARTIST=Soapy Argyle" {} +

But given the size of my collection, that would be burdensome.

Collection is organized ./Music/Genre/Artist/Album/Disk#/song.flac

How can I grab the artist name from the path and use it in the command above, or do something functionally similar?

As a bonus, this lists files that already have albumartist tagged.

find ./ -type f -name "*.flac" -exec metaflac --list {} + | grep -E -i 'ALBUM[[:space:]]*ARTIST'

Can I mesh these things together so I don't end up with a bunch of songs double tagged?

Thanks for any suggestions.

I've read somewhere you should not add file .sh to scripts since it can reduce POSIX compatibility, and in general linux doesnt need file extensions. However i'm seeing various CI tooling such as .editorconfig and shfmt relying on scripts ending with .sh and wondering how good of a convnetion is it not having .sh and relying on the shebang line.

e.g So,i have a directory with images that i need to sort and decided to use a photo manager but it only works with certain image formats. Now i want to know what files types are in my directory. Lets say some files dont have their extension

How do i generate a list of file types in directory recursively?

SOLVED :

The solution was to put the whole thing into a \.sh script. pkill command included.*

Hello,

I'm trying to automate a php script on my Ubuntu 22.04 system using cron.

Problem being, it dosen't start the php script. Here is the full command :

pkill -f Xaseco && cd /mnt/f4ee1d94-eea2-4982-8a9d-7059b2358d10/TrackmaniaBack/Xaseco; /usr/bin/php aseco.php Xaseco </dev/null >aseco.log 2>&1 & echo $!

It successfully kill the processus, but unable to start the php command.. Ive tried to read the syslogs but I couldn't find any errors here... so I'm at loss. Where do I fail ?

Thanks.

EDIT :

At first, all the commands were in a script. This did not work either.

pkill -f Xaseco && /mnt/f4ee1d94-eea2-4982-8a9d-7059b2358d10/TrackmaniaBack/launchXas.sh

#!/bin/bash

thing= echo \shotgun -s -f png``

bing=cat $thing

cjxl $bing.png $bing.jxl --quiet

This is the entirety of my code.
I want to just screenshot something and convert it into jxl. I could not even figure out how to do this using magick since image manipulation seems to be something so scarce. I do not want to "search" for the file i literally just generated so using fd or plocate would just waste time.
How do people use files other than text in scripting? I assume audio and video files you could do something with ffmpeg but is there a method?

programs used:

https://github.com/neXromancers/shotgun

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Screen_capture

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/JPEG_XL

cjxl

So when the protocol is https and I have a timeout of 60 it fails with the error 403: forbidden. But when the protocol is http with a timeout of 60 it works just fine. Why? Is it safe to just use http?