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HowTo Geek on Batch Renaming, Daemons, Distros, and More
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HowTo Geek ☛ Organize Your Linux Files the Easy Way With These 5 Batch Rename Methods
One of the most common tasks for those new to Linux is batch file renaming. If you’re not used to a Linux shell, this can seem like a task that is bound to be manual and time-consuming. But there are many ways to speed up the process; you just need to know which is best.
Example File Move Tasks
To demonstrate each approach, I’ll use two examples that represent common renaming tasks you may want to carry out. There are many different ways you might want to rename files, depending on their current names and what you’re actually doing. The two example tasks I’ll use can help to illustrate typical usage of each tool. However, you’ll need to investigate the tool of your choice further to understand how best to use it for your particular needs.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Your Linux PC Has Daemons. Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Them
You may have heard the term "daemon" concerning Linux. What are they? Are they something to be scared of? These little helper programs are an important part of Linux and will help take care of your systems and run essential services.
In Linux, daemons are programs that run independently to perform various tasks on the system. These are things like running cron to execute tasks at specific times, listening for incoming network connections, and cleaning up the filesystem, among others. They typically have names ending in "-d."
The concept arose in the 1960s with the MULTICS project, an ambitious attempt to create what would now be called "cloud computing." MIT computer scientist Fernando Carbató is credited with coining the term in a computing context, taking inspiration from the physicist James Clark Maxwell's thought experiment about an imaginary demon sorting molecules, known as "Maxwell's demon."
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HowTo Geek ☛ What’s That You’re Running? Linux Programs, Scripts, Builtins, Functions, and Aliases
What happens when you run a Linux command? This simple act can appear straightforward, but many different things can actually occur, depending on whether you’re running an executable program, a shell script, a shell builtin, a user-defined function, or an alias.
The Different Types of Linux Commands
A program (binary, or executable) is a file on disk somewhere, in a recognized format. Common formats include ELF on Linux, and Mach-O on Mac. The format is a low-level, machine-friendly one that the shell can pass off to the kernel to run.
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HowTo Geek ☛ All Linux Distro Are Not the Same. Here's Why and How They Differ
Have you heard people say that "all Linux is the same?" Are you unsure how two Linux distributions that share a software base can be different? Let me explain what's going on, and why developers have made so many distros.
There's a popular notion that all Linux distributions are essentially the same, and that you can start with one distro and potentially customize it enough to work and feel like a different distro. While theoretically that is possible, practically it would require weeks of technical troubleshooting—and even then you might fail! Now why would you put yourself through this trouble when somebody else has probably done the work for you and is offering it for free—as a new distro? As such, from a practical standpoint, all distros are not the same. Here's how they differ from one another and why these differences matter.