Inspirated

Over the 8 years of my acquaintance with computers valuable data has been lost at an average of twice per annum. I have tried all kinds of solution to help my situation only to fail miserably by forgetting to back up some important bits and pieces of information before upgrading my distro.

Backup solutions can mostly be factored into two approaches of archiving and cloning. If space is limited, you can archive your important data using utilities such as tar. This in fact was the approach I had been using until now. The downside appeared to be lesser accessibility of the files inside the backup. Say, I needed a small text-file from a 200 GB archive. It’d take me around 20 minutes to “get” to its location in the archive.

Which is why, I decided to shift to a newer approach. My laptop has a 320 GB hard disk and I own another 320 GB Western Digital Passport for extra data. To utilize the similitude, I bought another 500 GB Passport, transferred the “extra” data to it and then cloned the entire laptop hard disk to its 320 GB external cousin.

$ dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

That is all. dd‘s performance was questionable, as it took around 15 hours to clone the entire 320 GB. Nevertheless, this time around I was satisfied with the final backup. Not only was it a bit-by-bit replica of my original data but also an accessible repository which I could access easily by plugging in the USB.

A match made in heaven.

Using IRC in a reliable way has turned out to be kind of a challenge for me in the past couple of months. I had my cellphone connected 24/7 to the IRC channels I needed to idle in. Unfortunately, I don’t live in a 3G country so any voice-calls interrupted the whole thing.

I also wanted to use my laptop for IRC-ing whenever I was at home. But the inconsistent internet connection didn’t make thing any easier. There was always this lingering fear of missing important messages during one of the disconnections. I couldn’t foresee a solution which would fix all of the mentioned issues until someone recommended using Irssi along with GNU Screen.

This not only fixed every little issue I had ever had with IRC but also made full utilization of my love for all things command-line. In summary: I now have this “permanent” IRC session running at an SSH server in Lithuania. Whenever I feel like it, I can “attach” my laptop or my mobile and start using Irssi. If I receive any voice-calls, the IRC session still continues to work and I can “reattach” later on. Simply put, the session continues running even when I’m not attached to it through either device and at any time of the day I can simply connect to it and resume working through that day’s IRC activity.

Here’s a screenshot that shows me connected to the #gsoc channel on Freenode first on my laptop and then on my E71 using the same screen session:

PuTTY for Symbian is used for SSH-ing on the Nokia phone. If I ever rank top 5 situations where CLI absolutely pwns GUI in terms of efficiency and usage, this nifty setup is definitely going to make the list.

I could start off with an intro paragraph here but I’ll prefer keeping it sweet and simple: command-line is addictive.

For many kinds of tasks — ranging from system administration to organizing folders — I find CLI to be extraordinarily more productive than GUI clicking. For example, vim-ing through a code, if I decide I need to lookup a particular symbol in the current directory, I can quickly do a recursive grep without even taking my hands off the keyboard. Similarly, I find utilities such as mv or cp to be significantly faster than GUI file managers’ equivalent features. The learning curve is definitely steep and I also am not implying that everyone should find it equally productive but for me at least, it works like a charm.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that CLI provides a terrible amount of power at fingertips of its users. While that power is tremendous fun, it also can be a source of epic fails if not handled with caution. The fact of the matter is, as one grows accustomed to quickly doing work through text-based input, overlooking those cautions almost becomes second nature. It’s not uncommon to find a commandaholic holding his head in his hands while staring at the screen in disbelief. GUI does get credit for being a little more prone to accidental mistakes by consistently providing a visual view of what’s about to happen.

Moving on from the ill-starred mischief that I posted about last week, I thought I should compile a list of all time worst incidents of me cursing my fingers for being so familiar with the CLI. Here they are:

5. Ctrl-C

   Sometimes, I blame Christopher Sholes for putting the Z and C keys so close on the keyboard. ‘Nuff said.

4. Deleting the wrong partition in parted

   (parted) help rm                                                          
     rm NUMBER                                delete partition NUMBER
   
   	NUMBER is the partition number used by Linux.  On MS-DOS disk labels,
           the primary partitions number from 1 to 4, logical partitions from 5
           onwards.

   If you’re wondering why deleting a partition is placed so low on the list, the answer is TestDisk. Mere seconds after I deleted my primary partition containing all my data, I stopped all activities, booted into a rescue mode and used the God-sent utility to restructure my partition table like before with a cumulative data-loss of 0%.

3. e2fscking e2fucking a mounted file-system

   [root@orthanc ~]# e2fsck /dev/sda2
   e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
   /dev/sda2 is mounted.  
   
   WARNING!!!  Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause
   SEVERE filesystem damage.
   
   Do you really want to continue (y/n)? 

   See that SHOUTING WARNING? I did too. But back then, I ignored it as casually as anyone ignores licensing agreements. Needless to say, the results weren’t as inconsequential as clicking “I accept” and moving on without a hint of doing something legally binding.

2. rm -rfing the wrong directory

          -f, --force
                 ignore nonexistent files, never prompt
   
          -r, -R, --recursive
                 remove directories and their contents recursively
   

   If the last tool had the F-word in its title as the warning, this one should be read as rm --recursive-f***. The H-bomb of command-line tools, once you detonate it on a directory you didn’t mean to set it upon, even CTRL-C won’t be able keep you in one piece because of rm‘s ruthless speed and efficiency. The only ray of hope is ext3grep, but depending on numerous factors (partition structure, number of files, file types, alignment of stars etc.) your recovery prospects would range anywhere from ±100% to ±100%. You read that right.

1. mkfsing the wrong partition

          mkfs  is  used to build a Linux file system on a device, usually a hard
          disk partition.  filesys is either the device  name  (e.g.   /dev/hda1,
          /dev/sdb2).   blocks  is  the  number of blocks to be used for the file
          system.

   The granddaddy of all command-line fuckups. If you have confused /dev/sdb for /dev/sda (an easy slip up — as I learned the hard way), it’s time to move on. Sure, you will find people selling tools for recovering data from formatted Ext3 partitions; expecting those tools to work would be a lot like expecting the King of Pop to miraculously pop up from his coffin on Tuesday and perform a ground-breaking reenactment of 83’s Motown performance.

“Blessed are the forgetful; for they get the better even of their blunder.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you’re using KDE, KSnapshot can do the job for you. If you’re using GNOME, gnome-screenshot can also achieve the task with quite perfection. So why would someone ever need tinkering with command-line utilities to generate screenshots?

The answer is: xwd is useful because not everyone uses KDE or GNOME and those who don’t usually despise installing needless extra applications for something as trivial as capturing a screenshot. xwd comes with the X.org server itself, while almost all distributions by default provide the necessary software needed to convert xwd screenshots into more popular formats. Moreover, KSnapshot and gnome-screenshot have a plethora of dependencies on their relative desktop environments whereas xwd is a small, neat and efficient solution for capturing. Let’s start with the requirements:

Lights

The first thing that you need to be sure of is that you have either ImageMagick or Netpbm installed on your system. The quickest (generic) way for checking their existence is to issue man ImageMagick and man netpbm commands in a terminal. If you receive “No manual entry for …” errors for both commands, head over to your distribution’s website and download a package for ImageMagick since it would be relatively easier to find.

Camera

If you want to capture the whole screen, you can safely skip this section. However, if you want to target a particular window, some extra information shall be needed. Open a terminal and issue the command:

$ xwininfo
xwininfo: Please select the window about which you
would like information by clicking the
mouse in that window.

Click on the window for which you’d like to take the screenshot. You’ll be shown lots of details about your choice. Only the first line is important. It would be containing a window id. Something like:

xwininfo: Window id: 0x1a00003 “1. Rammstein – Mutter – Ich will (3:39) – Audacious”

Copy the window id. You’ll be needing it in the next section.

Action

Now comes the real part. If you want to capture the whole screen and have ImageMagick installed, use the following command:

$ xwd -root | convert xwd:- capture.png

A file named ‘capture.png’ shall be created in your current directory. You can change the png extension in the command to generate a variety of other formats (e.g. jpg, gif, tiff).

To capture a particular window, you have to provide the window id that xwininfo provided you. The final command will look something like:

$ xwd -id window id | convert xwd:- capture.png

Someone might start wondering here why didn’t I use import command from the ImageMagick suite. Actually, the problem with import is that it really doesn’t work well with all compositing window managers. For example, Emerald’s decorations are always chopped off whenever I take a screenshot with it.

If you have Netpbm installed, you can use these commands instead:

$ xwd -root | xwdtopnm | pnmtopng > capture.png

$ xwd -id window id | xwdtopnm | pnmtopng > capture.png

Finally, if you don’t like the terminal window in full-screen captures, you can insert sleep 3; before any command given above to give yourself some time for minimizing it.

Happy capturing!