Woohoo, I unlocked the MotherF*cker badge after 2 years of being here! Yes, it was a Kali question.

Aww, they deleted the comment (or a moderator did, after I flagged it)

I need help with https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/401956/how-do-i-unbuffer-the-output-pa‌​ssed-from-an-interactive-command-into-a-pipeline. Anybody interested?

@RandomDSdevel Did thrig's answer help?

@JeffSchaller The what badge?

@EliahKagan I don't follow "Having things configured so they work is better than not having them configured so they work". I think that in Debian, if you install recommended packages, you're fine. If you don't install them, then there can be problems - things might not work correctly, etc. But I think the default is to install recommended packages.

@EliahKagan Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, if you encounter a Debian bug, you should report it.

Having said that, even I sometimes don't do that. The probability of someone actually paying any attention to your bug report is quite low, in my experience.

Though Debian is better than some.

I've even seen Debian bug reports with precise diagnostics and an attached patch languish unread. I think I might have submitted one or two of those myself.

@FaheemMitha I got a sarcastic "thanks for the help, M-F" comment after I VTC the Q as a dupe of "Why is Kali so hard?. Sorry for the confusion, it's not a real badge.

@JeffSchaller Post the link here, and more people can VTC.

And you probably should flag that comment too.

It's been deleted. And the question has been closed.

@terdon ok

@JeffSchaller don't you love it when people somehow thing that calling you a "mother f*cker" is somehow better than using the actual words? Wonderful logic there.

I suppose it's not possible that M-F stands for My-Friend? :-)

@terdon oooooh, deleted by Jeff Schaller

@terdon I suppose they could have meant "Mother Focker", and wanted to Meet, but ... probably not

I need to figure out flagging once & for all. Seems like some flags move things to review queues, and others land on Moderator's desks. Needs another flowchart diagram :)

This one's special. Flagging a comment as rude or offensive will cause it to be deleted immediately if it contains certain patterns. Apparently, that was one of them.

@terdon ohhhhh! I learned something today! Go, Stack Exchange!

As a general rule, flags go to mods. The only exceptions I can think of now is the one above and the VLQ flags which feed into the review queues.

After a while, if they haven't been dealt with by the queue, then we get them too.

I'm trying to remember if there are close-flags at low rep (before close votes are earned)

ahh yes - unix.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions

yep

@terdon hmmm, interesting -- I'd always assumed that us peons had always managed to clear the queues; does this happen often? (that VLQ posts hit your desk)

@JeffSchaller Not often on U&L, no.

yay us!

I tend to ignore those flags, actually since I know the queues will deal with them.

hello all, shouldn't we protect unix.stackexchange.com/questions/892/… ?

@terdon I see. So not actually M-F then.

Not quite, no.

@Archemar Wow, that's a lot of answers.

some of them usefull ... sight

can anyone explain me what is a "device" as shown by the sat command, I thought i was just the inode number but it's not

stat*

Also, is it possible to find the file given the inode?

@Trey That's something you can do a search for. I just did, and it gives me:

@FaheemMitha How does that address Trey's question?

Also stackoverflow.com/questions/1340263/…

Ah! The second question. Right.

@Trey I've not tested any of these methods, and in any case, they are somewhat filesystem specific.

@Trey the device reported by stat when reporting on a file is device number of mount point, more precisely 256* MAJOR + MINOR

And assuming the fs is ext4, I'd try the debugfs approach to start with.

as to how can this be usefull, I don't know, but I don't know all about unix.

thanks

@EliahKagan: Let me check. I've just now gotten back on here again after work today.

To follow up: haven't opened Terminal again yet today, but said answer does look promising. Hopefully brew install expect gave me autoexpect(1) as well, as I can never quite remember which 'execute' bit one has to set in a script's permissions to make it…well, executable, without looking it up (maybe it's the user one…or was it the group one…? Shrugs, sets the question aside for later resolution with reference to documentation. If I ran custom scripts more often, I'd remember.)

@FaheemMitha This was several years ago. Unfortunately I don't remember the problem well enough. I don't remember if I was on stable or testing. (I've used unstable, too, but I think I would remember if the problem with not being able to shut down the machine from an LXDE session had happened on unstable, because I would've thought, "Oh, this doesn't work on unstable right now," rather than, "Oh, the lxde metapackage doesn't work out-of-the-box for restarting and shutting down from the desktop.")

I did allow all recommends dependencies of the lxde metapackage to be installed. You're right I should report problems in Debian as bugs; not all Ubuntu bugs get fixed either but I tend to report those, after all. In this case, I don't actually remember the problem well enough to know if I would consider it a bug, because I've had similar problems on different OSes. If it showed the shut down option in the menu that comes up to log off in LXDE, but that option didn't work, that was a bug.

But if it didn't show the option at all, then I think I would've assumed it was intended behavior that unprivileged users weren't allowed to shut down from the desktop under the configuration you get from installing lxde, or even that they were allowed to do so but that it was intended that the LXDE desktop not expose this ability without further configuration. This is the sort of thing I was thinking of when I spoke ambiguously of what Ubuntu's -desktop metapackages are trying to provide.

@EliahKagan I don't think that not allowing unprivileged LXDE users to log out was by design. At least, I've never seen it anywhere else in Debian. However, I've never used LXDE, so couldn't say for sure.

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/402104/… is my question clear, or do I have to elaborate on it? I want the path of a special item. Not the general path where .desktop files are stored.

@EliahKagan Even if it didn't show the option at all, it could still be a bug.

My recollection was that it did work in Xfce on the same system. Now I'm really wishing I'd filed a bug so that I could go read my bug report to recall exactly what did and didn't work.

@FaheemMitha To shut down, you mean? (Logging out worked fine, and I'd expect unprivileged users to be able to do that.)

@EliahKagan Sure, shut down as well.

I don't use a lot of DMs, so I could be wrong.

But if so, I suppose someone will say so.

I don't see the point of trying to restrict the person sitting in front of the desktop from shutting down. They could always just hit the power button, which would be worse.

@JonasStein But you want the path of the specific .desktop file, right? Not the executable in the file's Exec= line, but the .desktop file that the menu is using for a specific item?

@JonasStein Don't have an answer, but upvoted, fwiw.

Nice to see an answer not about - halp, my computer broke, how to fix?

I see you're a TeX user too.

"missed to remove" could be written as "did not remove". I think that would be more standard.

@EliahKagan yes. There is a orphaned entry in the meny. I want to track down the .desktop file which creates it. Find out, why it is still there...

@FaheemMitha thank you. Will change that. Yes I use TeX since decades and it kills me slowly ;-)

@JonasStein Not a TeX fan? :-)

It is pure pain, but I do not know anything better.

If I won the lottery, I would pay 10 people to rewrite TeX from scratch.

Its broken by design. But it is how things were done decades ago

TeX does not separate layout and content, as we know it today and its language is very poor.

@JonasStein I quite like TeX, but I agree it is a programming nightmare.

Today there is no excuse that a code crashes without usable error messages.

And there isn't any alternative to it, afaik.

@JonasStein Agreed. Totally useless debugging messages.

I switched to lualatex. It can do utf8 properly at least

But there is nothing better on the horizon.

@JonasStein I doubt its error message are any better. It still uses TeX.

Times ago there was some hope for latex3 but its dead

Do you find TeX SE useful/helpful?

@JonasStein LaTeX 3 is still in "development". :-)

But wouldn't change the overall picture substantially, anyway.

tex.sx is the No 1 tex community in my opinion

@JonasStein Well, there isn't a lot of competition.

I tried context too, it has nice ideas and some new stupid ideas. But in the end it is a one man show.

If TeX would be just a little bit worse, the pain threshold would be triggered and people start to rewrite it

@JonasStein Oh, is that right? I don't know anything about Context.

@JonasStein Unfortunately, the free software community isn't really set up to rewrite big projects from scratch. No proper funding. No real planning or organization.

bibtex is the same desaster. All .bib files, but no clear standard

which editor do you use?

@JonasStein Emacs

I use texstudio. In my eyes the best by far. But since a few years very instable too

with auctex?

Emacs is painful too. It took till version 24 or so until they could do line numbers

and if you switch line numbers on, it is slow

@JonasStein Yes, AUCTeX. But I haven't written much LaTeX in recent years.

every distribution has a package manager, python has, it is no rocketscience how to do it right. But emacs guys invent their own packagemanager with 0 security.

@JonasStein You mean ELPA?

Understandable. With Auctex... Took me hundreds of hours to configure emacs with all bells and whistles.

yes m(elpa)

Emacs is less than perfect. But like TeX, there is nothing else like it.

it is just plain stupid. Emacs could simply copy one of the working package managers

we have a lot of work to keep the emacs packages sane on Gentoo linux

a trillion lisp files and no maintained repository... a wiki page here, a broken url there, ...

@JonasStein Are you a Gentoo developer?

yes.

@JonasStein Ah, ok.

If you want to write packages for Gentoo just ask me.

@JonasStein Thanks for the offer.

I tried .deb for years and did not fully understand it. But you can learn Gentoo packages in a weekend.

@JonasStein Debian packaging is not that hard.

It's a bit more complicated than some.

@JonasStein Do you like Stack Exchange?

yes, that is why I am here. Why do you ask?

;-)

I like the voting system. It works fine for many subjects.

Finances and Homeimprovement.sx are negative examples, but all computer related ones and skeptics are impressive

@FaheemMitha are you developing for a distribution too?

@JonasStein No particular reason. Just making conversation.

@JonasStein No. I tried to make a package for Debian once, but they rejected it.

For no good reason, in my opinion. And ignored me when I responded.

that was one reason for me to leave debian after a decade

If you find a bug and write a report, you can save your time and tell you dog about it

most bug reports on debian do not get attention, because stable and testing are old. Unstable is unstable so you should not report bugs.

on Gentoo we have some sleeping bug reports too. But the communication between user and gentoo dev and upstream dev is much better

If you file a bug on gentoo the ticket is read and assigned to the right person in 2 days on average.

50% get solved in less a week

I remember a nice tool checkinstall on debian. That one could make .debs very easy...

@JonasStein That's a good statistic.

@JonasStein That's not true. You can and should report bugs on unstable packages. In fact, you're encouraged to do so.

Well, in so far as Debian encourages anyone to do anything.

It's true that Debian isn't perfect. But they have an excellent track record in all sorts of ways.

There are lots of problems, of course.

For example, package maintainership has little or no accountability.

Ditto for all the important "management" positions in Debian.

do you know repology?

And suppose your package is rejected by the FTPmasters, and they ignore your response, there's no appeal procedure. They just ignore you. End of story.

@JonasStein What's that?

I found this page a few months ago. I like it repology.org

You can look up packages in all distributions

@JonasStein Interesting. I'd not seen that before.

Which distro has latest version, who maintains, open bugs...?

it helps distros to work together

If i have a problem on Gentoo with foo, I look how others solve it or inform them about our experience

that saves time and brings us together

I wonder who runs it. Looks like a lot of work.

I think its a spare time project

they provide a powerful api too

And Debian's NM process was really messed up for awhile. Lots of complaints. I'm not sure if it is fixed/better now.

@JonasStein I see. Sounds useful.

assume you are an auctex developer. Then you can put this nice badge on your github repo

repology.org/metapackage/auctex/badges

@JonasStein I notice you've not been very active on U&L in the past. Lack of time? Lack of interest? Anyway, hope to see you around in the future, even if only on chat.

This room isn't very active though. It could be better.

U&L has not so many users. I have only few questions which fit there. The Linux topic is split too much

askubuntu.com should be part of U&L

@JonasStein Well, many of us have mixed feelings about that.

@FaheemMitha I just see that I have 26 questions and 5 answers here... that is a bad statistic

@FaheemMitha do you often work with bash scripts?

I have a cool program for you then before I leave the chat again

it is parallel

you can run multiple threads in bash very easy and make things very fast. See you later.

@RandomDSdevel This is about that, right? Do you mean permissions so autoexpect can run your script, or for the script autoexpect generates?

You can run a script with autoexpect the same as without autoexpect. That is, if your script isn't executable and you run it with foo script where foo is the interpreter and script is the script, you can put that after autoexpect too.

@JonasStein we know, and the maintainer of GNU parallel is a regular on the site

really? Great!

I love that tool and it is so unknown

So if he reads that I am advertising his tool, I will get many upvotes ;-)

@JonasStein whenever I hear “you can learn X in a weekend”, I conclude “X only handles the simplest cases”

@JonasStein Regrettably, I'm basically shell-illiterate.

@Gilles This is often true ;-)

@RandomDSdevel As for the expect script autoexpect generates, that file (named by default script.exp, regardless of the actual command you had autoexpect run, but you can use the -f option to give your own name) should be created with the appropriate permissions. If that file is created but not executable, perhaps you're running autoexpect in a directory that is on a filesystem mounted noexec (or of a type that doesn't support executable permissions).

@JonasStein U&L has many users. But comparatively few are active. I don't have statistics, but they could be easily obtained.

@JonasStein Yeah, it seems like it's not all that widely known, out in the wider world. It's odd, too, that GNU Parallel is not better known, since there's actually a section in the Bash reference manual that recommends it as an alternative to using shell-based asynchronous facilities and shows some use cases.

@EliahKagan I thought Parallel was reasonably well known.

But I'm not sure how you measure such a thing...

And people don't read documentation. We all know that.

I mean, I occasionally try, but I suspect I'm already in the minority.

Yeah, I guess I could just be wrong about how well known it is. But I don't see all that many instances of people blogging about using it, posting questions about it, or answering questions by recommending it. On SE I'm the most active on Ask Ubuntu though; perhaps it's just not that well known among Ubuntu users.

@EliahKagan Do you think it is something that is generally useful?

GNU Parallel? Yes.

@EliahKagan I've used it very little myself.

Hi Fabby. Long time no see.

Yeah, I've been busy with work...

First 6 months on the new job were hell.

The year after that very tiring.

@Fabby Sounds rough.

Any better now?

Now I'm in "I'll do as much as I can without going nuts"

I plan to work only 8 hours...

@Fabby Sounds sensible. I'm hope they are compensating you properly, at least.

If it's more, so be it, but I plan for 8 and let everyone know that I'm not supposed to work after office hours.

How is the work itself?

@FaheemMitha I got 0,06% pay raise over inflation.

It's fabulous! I'm learning a lot!

@Fabby In the past year?

But it's also tiring...

@FaheemMitha year and a half.

Smoke! BRB

@Fabby That does not sound good.

@Fabby Sleep time. Talk to you later, hopefully. Don't be a stranger.

Will drop by more often as I'm contemplating switching away from Ubuntu...

@Fabby Is that relevant?

Well yeah, as I've been camping out in the AU chat every now and then, but haven't been here for over a year...

I'm contemplating Arch, but am not sure about the DE yet.

I positively hate Gnome's "let's keep it as simple as possible" attitude, because it's leaning towards stupid

@EliahKagan Never mind, turns out the autoexpect part of unix.stackexchange.com/a/401967/86927 isn't relevant for my needs. Also, see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/401956/… for a bit of a wrinkle I've spotted in things.

And figuring out what permissions to give the expect script was so simple I feel silly I forgot about what they are. (The answer: chmod ugo+x $script.)

(Though that may be overkill…)

@Fabby You can still visit here, even if you use Ubuntu. Others do.

@FaheemMitha I thought you were going to sleep?

What time is it?

04:30?

@Fabby I've been trying to.

:P

@Fabby Close. 4.35 am.

Shall I ask a mod to ban you from the chat room for an hour???

Stupid air conditioner outside. Keeping me awake. The A/Cs here are a nightmare.

;-) :P ;-)

@Fabby It wouldn't help.

Lots of money might help. Then I could move somewhere quieter. With less air conditioners.

:-)

When I'm tired, I sleep through everything except ticking clocks.

/shrug.

@Fabby I guess I'm not tired enough.

At 04:39?

When does your shift start?

@RandomDSdevel Where script is the name of your script, chmod +x script should be sufficient for most cases. If that's not usually what you want, then you might want to have your umask set differently. (That's what chmod uses to decide who to give permissions when you use + without any preceding string specifying whose permissions you're changing.)

As for the full question of who needs executable permissions, the owner (u) needs them if they're running it, otherwise the group owner (g) needs them if a member of the group is running it, otherwise a user who is neither the owner nor a member of the group owner of the file is running the script so "other" (o) needs them.

This is assuming, of course, that the permissions are not overridden by an access control list or other mechanism such as AppArmor--which is usually a reasonable assumption. Note that, for scripts but not binary executables, the interpreter has to actually be able to read the script to run commands from it, so read permissions are also needed.

@EliahKagan: Thanks, makes sense.

Can you help me with chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/40925035#40925035, though?

@Fabby Though I don't have any plans to switch my existing Ubuntu installations to it, I've been meaning to try out Arch Linux for several years now but I've never gotten around to it. I've never used it at all! (I've used Gentoo, but never Arch.) If this is something that interests you, perhaps we could delve into Arch at around the same time or something. You can let me know.

@RandomDSdevel Hmm, maybe. Let me take a look.

Though I've got to go afk for a bit right now.

@EliahKagan Great. Thanks!

I'll see your chat messages though -- if you ping me I'll be notified.

'Kay, I'll be on 'til 10 (EDT.)

Sounds good. That's my time zone too.

High-fives.