Data FUP limits (that's what they call them here) have been increasing quite fast here. Though still low. And of course lots of place don't have these limits.

I'm sure most top-level routers are a lot more complex but all of the routers I've worked with don't set bandwidth on interfaces either. The "bandwidth" setting is used only in routing metrics, the router will try to transfer traffic at the best speed it can regardless of what you set "bandwidth" too. The way to limit bandwidth is with QoS, but to me net neutrality seems anti-qos

And to set QoS on essentially infinite types of traffic would be an administrative nightmare, so the easiest method would be to just limit your biggest offenders to a percentage of the pipe.

@Jesse_b Or you're running an odd shell... That second and third echo of yours should give some output, or an error if the shell doesn't support substrings.

@ParanoidPanda yes

I wish Realtek would stop selling their dreadful hardware, and that people would stop buying them and installing them in computers.

When I was a little boy, I had textile craft classes in school. We had to take a "drivers license" on the sewing machines before we were allowed to use them unsupervised, just to show that we knew how to use them properly and safely. Just saying... extrapolate to the topic of the site.

@Kusalananda I don't follow your point.

Did you like the craft classe?

@FaheemMitha That's the wrong end of the text to take hold of.

@Kusalananda Just asking.

@FaheemMitha Do people learn how to use Unix nowadays? Sometimes I think it's more trial and error. Granted, that's how I learnt at first as well, but I did not have root access on the system I was fooling around with.

@Kusalananda How does one learn Unix? By taking a course? Or self-study?

And what would one learn, exactly?

@FaheemMitha Basic workings of the shell and user interface. Pipelines, permissions, basic best practices with regards to the super user account. The most commonly used tools. Regular expressions and filename globbing patterns. A week-long course would be enough.

@Kusalananda I can't do regular expressions. The other stuff looks reasonable. Doesn't look like you are setting a very high bar here.

Though "most commonly used tools" is a bit vague. That's potentially a rather large list.

@FaheemMitha Not a very high bar, I know :-/

Maybe U&L should organise an online course. Like Khan Academy.

I'm going out for a walk. I have a 5 km path around a bird sanctuary (with cows) just around the corner.

@Kusalananda Have a nice walk. Stay warm.

@Kusalananda Yeah, I still haven't figured it out...I think it's something to do with how I'm pulling the info from airport but tr -d " " solves my issue.