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today's howtos
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XDA ☛ Stop using these 6 built-in Linux commands; I found something way better
Linux comes with a lot of great command-line tools out of the box, but there are even better alternatives available for a good number of them. I'm not talking about obscure tools that you'd reserve for niche scenarios, but common staples that every Linux user is intimately familiar with, like ls, cat, grep, and man. Despite the ubiquity of these commands, I've replaced them with superior options and mostly stopped using them.
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HowTo Geek ☛ These 9 uncommon grep flags are the secret to finding anything from the Linux terminal
If your typical grep workflow involves piping output through three other commands just to get what you need, then you’re doing it wrong. Grep has dozens of powerful flags that can help you count the number of lines, limit the output, extract patterns, and a whole lot more. Here are nine grep flags to help you find anything from the Linux terminal.
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HowTo Geek ☛ This one Linux shell character made me feel like a hacker
Like many people using Unix-like operating systems for the first time, I was introduced to the concept of the pipeline. Here's how a single character on the command line changed everything.
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HowTo Geek ☛ The terminal tricks nobody talks about (but everyone should know)
The best thing about working with the terminal is just how efficient it can be. Imagine if someone gave you a thousand documents and told you to replace specific patterns of text inside those files. You could spend days opening those files in an editor and manually replacing the text inside them. Or you could run a single "sed" command and be done in a few seconds. It genuinely feels like a superpower the more I learn about it and practice it. Here are 6 things I learned that made the terminal less frustrating for me and sped things up at the same time.
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HowTo Geek ☛ 8 ways to delete a file in Linux—and when to use each
When a file is no longer serving a purpose, it’s time to delete it, and you probably know at least one way of doing so. But there may be more ways than you realize, and each has its own advantages, quirks, and things to teach us.
From GUI to command line and even lower-level than that, discover more about getting rid of files.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Battling bots
I've already blocked entire countries to combat scrapers, I update my robots.txt for well-behaved bots (and 403 any included in the list that access anything other than my robots.txt). In addition to these steps, I've started blocking traffic from IPs contained in Spamhaus' DROP and DROPv6 lists.
The script I use to handle these lists and countries is as follows.