So, I thought it might be fun and insightful to have a thread to share something we recently learned. Could be Linux related, or not
To start things off, I’ll give an example.
I’ve been using Linux since the early 2000s and using vim since the beginning. It was only maybe 4 or 5 years ago that I learned (and having been using vim for 10+ years at that point) that when I wish to save my changes and exit I do not need to do :wq but can instead simply do :x mind = blown
BTW: In that other OS it lives in \windows\system32\drivers\etc which is handy to know if you want one of those machines to hook up to a local webserver. (In current versions you will need to operate a text editor as Administrator in order to edit it.)
I found that out the hard way when Arch put samba v4 in the repositories. I took me roughly eight hours to figure out that Windows has a hosts file also. Boy they sure hid that one well. Under drivers?
Again, not something I learned recently but it was something I learned after using Arch for a long time. If you want to see what files are contained in a certain package installed on your system you can do the command pacman -Ql package_name
If you have a physical package (say something you’ve just built from the AUR) you can instead run pacman -Qpl package_name.tar.xz (or whatever the extension is now, I forgot )
To see what files are contained in packages not installed on your computer, use pacman -Fly instead. The -y switch is needed to refresh the package database.
Just make sure to update directly after running that, because that will refresh the local package database, and if you install something after that, you may end up in the partial update scenario.
If it needs sudo, it is making changes to your computer
The -F database is not the same as the normal pacman database.
Of course if you update it -Fy then changes are gonna be made. But not to the normal pacman database, just the file database.
EDIT: the databases are in /var/lib/pacman/sync, package databases have .db file ending, files databases… .files.
(correct me if I’m wrong, I did not really check it through)
Today I learned how important mutual respect, keeping a good tone in conversation, the ability of considering an issue from different and someone else’s perspectives and openness towards ideas that might or might nor bear fruit, are for a community whose aim is to thrive and prosper.