Hello, I have date (GNU coreutils) 7.1 installed on my system. If i try to check for any dates prior to 14-Dec-1901, i get invalid date errors. What should i do to make the date utility to treat years prior to 1901 as valid??? eg: $ date -d 1901-12-13 date: invalid date `1901-12-13' $...

How do i completely disable an account? passwd -l will not allow anyone to log into an account using a password but you can still log in via private/public keys. How would i disable the account completely? As a quickfix i renamed the file to authorized_keys_lockme. Is there another way?

Recently in a bout of frustration with getting phpmyadmin setup, I decided to start from scratch. Unfortunately, during the uninstall phase, I was prompted with the root password for mysql which I didn't have on hand at the time. Suffice to say, it informed me that there would be residue compone...

In short, I'm in an effort to replace less with vim (vimpager). I have settings for scripts to spit out colors (and bold and everything nice) whenever they can. less understands the color codes and displays them nicely. How can I make vim parse the codes and display colors/boldness the way less d...

I'm referring to messages like these: yeswanth (~yeswanth@115.184.67.87) has joined #python-dev and yeswanth has quit (Ping timeout: 260 seconds)

Sometimes, I'm getting as an input tab separated list, which is not quite aligned, for instance var1 var2 var3 var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3 Is there an easy way to render them aligned? var1 var2 var3 var_with_long_name_which_ruins...

Currently I can only login to my remote linux via the "ubuntu" user account, without a password (via SSH authentication). I have another user configured on the machine, and if I try to login with its username + password I get Disconnected: No supported authentication methods available How...

hi, when in gone through one shell script(.sh) file i have seen the term "$?" May i know what is the significance of this?

Hi, I'm trying to read a child process's stack but with no luck. I know it is possible using ptrace, but ptrace's interface allows you to read only one word at a time, and I'm trying to scan a larger portions of the stack. I've also tried reading the proc/$pid/mem from the boundries of the stac...

I just renamed a log file to "foo.log.old", and assumed that the application will start writing a new logfile at "foo.log". I was surprised to discover that it tracked the logfile to its new name, and kept appending lines to "foo.log.old". In Windows, I'm not familiar with this kind of behavior ...

My home computer is behind an ISP-level NAT which does not allow me to host game servers as a result. I have a VPS which I use as a web server. I want to host a game server of Minecraft, but the VPS isn't powerful enough. Both my computer and my VPS are running Linux. My computer can connect to...

I've been a Windows user since forever. I touched linux here and there, but my next job will have me use linux as my desktop computer 100% of the time. What are some essential tips/info I should know about? (Please community wiki this question)

How do i get K3b to split a volumes across several mediums? For example if i give it a folder that has 6Gb (not one file of 6gb), it should create several discs of 4,4 GB automatically, instead of me doing it manually? If K3B cant do it, is there any software that can?

I have been experimenting with IPv6. Hurricane Electric through their http://tunnelbroker.net service offer a free IPv6 tunnel. I would like to be able to use this reliably on my Fedora 14 desktop workstation. I've tried a number of different recipes on the web to get this set up but none seem to...

What would be the best distro for running off a USB, tried with ubuntu but it was too slow because of I/O. Would it be possible to run it from memory so it it's faster or would that make initial loading a lot slower? What i need is something that i can run off a USB that boots and shuts down fast...

Since I found out about LVM I have been giving more thought to the process for choosing the file system for my future installs. Usually I'd always choose whatever default option the distro would offer me for my partitions. And that works fine when we are talking about just a simple desktop. If...

Hi! I try to add the auth_mod_auth (3.0.0) module to my Slackware 13 (apache 2.2 & MySQL 5.0) system but I got the following error: /usr/lib/apr-1.3.12/build-1/libtool --silent --mode=compile i486-slackware-linux-gcc -prefer-pic -O2 -march=i486 -mtune=i686 -DLINUX=2 -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_...

Hi I am looking for a command that will return the owner of a directory.... and only that. maybe a regex thing for ls -lat command or something? I don't know. I want to use the result in another script. Thanks