Posts about command line

Using MergerFS to combine multiple hard drives into one unified media storage
March 11, 2024
My situation was simple -- I have on my home server a 2 TB hard drive for media storage that was filling up, and I wanted to add a second drive, but not have to keep track of which drive specific files were in. Enter mergerfs, an open source "union filesystem" that lets you merge multiple storage drives into one mount point.
Commands to turn off display in the Linux terminal
December 3, 2022
Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.
Autologin on Ubuntu and go straight to terminal
November 25, 2022
Configure an Ubuntu machine to autologin and go straight into the terminal on boot.
Setup auto-updates in Debian and Ubuntu with Unattended-Upgrades and NeedRestart
October 14, 2022
If you want your Linux machine to stay up-to-date on important security updates, but you don't want to SSH into it all the time to run updates and would rather set it and forget it, this is the way.
Transferring files between hosts with SCP
September 26, 2022
Using the Secure Copy (SCP) utility in Linux lets you securely copy files to and from remote hosts, and it's very easy to use.
Linux Commands & Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
September 18, 2022
Just a quick cheat sheet of basic and slightly less basic Linux commands, as well as handy keyboard shortcuts, that I maintain for myself since I can't always remember them all.
Bootstrapping a fresh Linux install with Ansible
September 3, 2022
Ansible is an IT tool that enables Infrastructure as Code, letting you automate provisioning, configuration, management and deployment of services and applications. I like using it at a fraction of it's full power to bootstrap fresh installs of Linux for my homelab.
Quick guide to set up Zsh and Oh-My-Zsh with essential plugins and a theme
December 4, 2021
I've been getting more and more comfortable working on the command line in Linux, and looked into ways to pretty it up and make it more user friendly. Enter Zsh, an alternative to Bash shell, and the Oh-My-Zsh framework used to customize the terminal experience to your heart's content. Here's my basic set up.
Rsync - A Quick Guide
September 15, 2021
Rsync is a very handy tool for doing high-speed file transfers between Linux hosts over a local network or remote hosts on the internet, such as EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You can pass options to Rsync to do things like recursive transfer (all files and sub-directories within the source directory are also transferred), ignore existing or newer files at the destination, and more.
Mounting (either internal or external) hard drives in Linux
September 13, 2021
When using Linux headless, such as via SSH or with no desktop environment, accessing a newly installed hard drive (not just external USB drives, but additional internal HDDs too) is not obvious, and most people end up having to Google it. I know I did. So let's have a quick and dirty guide on how.