How To Search Manual Pages In Linux

Linux system consists of hundreds of binaries, several syscalls, and other stuffs that do have manual page. What if you want to locate or find the commands by searching through the manual pages? In this post, I am going to talk about one such useful command to search through the manual page names and short descriptions.

The command I am talking about is the apropos command. The best way to learn any linux command is to read its corresponding manual and go through the help (-h or --help) so lets poke through the help of apropos itself.

samar@Techgaun:~$ apropos -h
Usage: apropos [OPTION...] KEYWORD...

  -d, --debug                emit debugging messages
  -v, --verbose              print verbose warning messages
  -e, --exact                search each keyword for exact match
  -r, --regex                interpret each keyword as a regex
  -w, --wildcard             the keyword(s) contain wildcards
  -a, --and                  require all keywords to match
  -l, --long                 do not trim output to terminal width
  -C, --config-file=FILE     use this user configuration file
  -L, --locale=LOCALE        define the locale for this search
  -m, --systems=SYSTEM       use manual pages from other systems
  -M, --manpath=PATH         set search path for manual pages to PATH
  -s, --section=SECTION      search only this section
  -?, --help                 give this help list
      --usage                give a short usage message
  -V, --version              print program version

Mandatory or optional arguments to long options are also mandatory or optional
for any corresponding short options.

The --regex option is enabled by default.

Report bugs to cjwatson@debian.org.

Particularly, the -e switch is quite useful to filter out your search. See the example below:

samar@Techgaun:~$ apropos -e tar
bf_tar (1)           - shell script to write a tar file of a bogofilter direc...
bf_tar-bdb (1)       - shell script to write a tar file of a bogofilter direc...
git-tar-tree (1)     - Create a tar archive of the files in the named tree ob...
lz (1)               - gunzips and shows a listing of a gzip'd tar'd archive
mxtar (1)            - Wrapper for using GNU tar directly from a floppy disk
ptar (1)             - a tar-like program written in perl
tar (1)              - The GNU version of the tar archiving utility
tar (5)              - format of tape archive files
tgz (1)              - makes a gzip'd tar archive
uz (1)               - gunzips and extracts a gzip'd tar'd archive

Each command has its associated short description and the apropos command searches the short description section of appropriate manual page for the provided keyword. You can also specify the search keywords in the form of regular expression for more flexibility. I hope this command counts as useful one :)


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Access Linux Filesystems In Windows Using Linux Reader

Earlier today, I had to access my HDD in Windows 7 through USB bridge which I had been using as an internal hard disk for my laptop but unfortunately it didn't. A quick googling revealed a very useful tool by Diskinternals.

Linux Reader is a free software from Diskinternals which excel in building recovery software solutions. Linux reader supports several filesystems used by Linux OS. Below is the list of supported filesystems:

• Ext2/3/4
• ReiserFS, Reiser4
• HFS, HFS+
• FAT, exFAT
• NTFS, ReFS
• UFS2

The program provides for read-only access and does not allow you to make records in file system partitions. This guarantees that the interference in an alterative file system will not affect the work of Linux later. Apart from this, it is necessary to note, that it gives you an opportunity to use common Windows Explorer for extracting data. A preview option for pictures is one more pleasant point, which is worth mentioning. While saving, it ignores file security policies. It means that it is possible to access absolutely any file on a Linux disk from Windows.

More details on Diskinternal's site

Download Linux Reader


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How To Enable SPDY 3 In Firefox 15

Firefox 15 now supports version 3 of SPDY, an open networking protocol designed to reduce latency of web pages but is not turned on by default. This post will provide the instruction to enable SPDY 3.

Type in address bar, about:config and then search for spdy. Now you will see a particular preference name network.http.spdy.enabled.v3 which is by default set to false.

All you have to do is double click on that preference name to change its value to true. This will enable version 3 of SPDY in your firefox 15.

Note that SPDY v3 will bring support for flow control, update the compression dictionary, and remove wasted space from certain frames, along with other minor bug fixes.

Also, note that the version 3 of SPDY is included for the first time in firefox 15 and might not be fully stable.


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How To Automatically Start Firefox In Private Browsing Mode

In this post, I will provide the instructions for few of the methods to automatically start firefox in private browsing mode.

Method 1

Go to Edit -> Preferences and then select the Privacy tab. From the History dropdown list, choose the Firefox will Use custom settings for history and then check the Always use the private browsing mode option.

Method 2

The second method involves changing the firefox configuration which can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar. The first method described above essentially changes one particular preference name browser.privatebrowsing.autostart in background and this second method involves doing that background job manually on our own.

Once you open about:config configuration page, search for private and from the resulting list, modify the boolean value of browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to true by double clicking on it.

I hope this helps. If you got any other method, please drop it as a comment. :)


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Firefox 15 Released With Support For SPDY 3

The stable firefox 15 has been released yesterday on August 28 with several enhancements and changes on user interface, plugins and performance.

Among the changes, Firefox 15 provides a support for version 3 of SPDY, an open networking protocol developed at google labs with the aim of reducing the latency of web pages. Other notable changes are WebGL enhancements, including compressed textures for better performance and Optimized memory usage for add-ons.

Several other changes have been added to make firefox more superior choice for general users and developers. Few more supports for HTML5 has been also added. You can read the Firefox release notes and complete list of changes.

You can download firefox 15 for your appropriate device from HERE.


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Ubuntu "Precise Pangolin" 12.04.1 LTS Released

After few months of release of Precise Pangolin, the Canonical and ubuntu developers have finally released the version 12.04.1 of Long Term Support (LTS) of Ubuntu for desktop, server, cloud and core products.

For your information, each new LTS version is released every 2 years. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, both desktop and server versions will receive 5 years support. Earlier versions received 3 years support for desktop version and 5 years support for server version.

Among all the changes, the most notable one is the support for Calxeda ECX-1000 SoC family for supporting low-energy hyper-scale data centre servers.

The Ubuntu Cloud Archive also makes its debut - essentially an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

Certified 12.04.1 Ubuntu Cloud images are now available on Amazon Web Services and will soon be posted to Windows Azure as well.

You can follow the detailed Release Announcement and Change Summary for Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS.

You can download Ubuntu 12.04 LTS from HERE.


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Gimp 2.8 Updated With More Features

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has been released with several new features and fixes. GIMP 2.8 features is equipped with several useful features including single-window mode which is probably one of the highly requested features and the latest v. 2.8.2 provides few more bug fixes and updates.

GIMP developers had released the stable release of GIMP back in May and GIMP release note states that the new release is a result of 3 years of collaborative inputs from the people all around the world.

Among all the improvements, the single window mode feature is one of the most awaited features. You can now toggle between the default multi-window mode and the new single-window mode through the Single-window mode checkbox in the Windows menu. In single-window mode, GIMP will put dockable dialogs and images in a single, tabbed image window.

There are several additions and improvements in user interface, tools and plugins. Likewise, several API has been refactored to ease the script development easier and better. Also, the GIMP license has been changed to (L)GPLv3+ from now onwards.

Similarly, several bugs have been fixed including the most notable ones such as not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw and not showing page setup options on Windows.

GIMP is available for download from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/. You can also choose any other mirror suitable for you.

The release note provides a information on installation of GIMP 2.8.

You can also install GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 using PPA. Fire up the terminal and just type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

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Hack Attack The Networks With Yersinia

Yersinia is a network attack tool that takes advantages of inherent weaknesses of several protocols to attack the network using different attack vectors. Yersinia can prove as a solid tool for analyzing and testing the deployed networks and systems for possible weaknesses.

The protocols implemented for testing using Yersinia are:

• Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP)
• IEEE 802.1Q
• IEEE 802.1X
• Inter-Switch Link Protocol (ISL)
• VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP)

Yersinia supports number of attacks in all of the above listed network protocols and hence can be used (or misused) to test any network.

The tool works on several operating systems such as OpenBSD 3.4 (with pcap libraries >= 0.7.2), Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x, Solaris 5.8 64bits SPARC, Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger (Intel), etc.

Installation on ubuntu: Fire up the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install yersinia

To download yersinia for other distros, go through the Download section of yersinia.


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