Greater force powers
Sage advice for your journey to master-level command-line Jedi:
1 screen If you SSH into remote machine regularly, you’ll find screen to be a wonderful companion. Using the utility you can run a process without maintaining an active shell session. To run a time consuming process inside a remote machine, first connect to it with SSH. Then type screen to start the screen session. You can now initiate the time-consuming process like an update or a download. When it’s underway, press Ctrl+A and D to detach from the screen session but leave the process running. You can then terminate the SSH process. Later on when you reconnect to the SSH session, you can check on the status of the update or download by restoring the screen session with screen -r . Use screen -ls if you have multiple screen sessions and then reconnect to the one you want by specifying its session ID, such as screen -r 6754 .
2 renice If you have a process that’s hogging the resources on your computer, you can use the renice command to assign it a lower priority. Linux assigns a priority to each process and the ones with higher priority are first given access to the system’s resources while others with lower priority have to wait for their turn. The renice command can assign a priority value between -20 and 19. The lower the number the higher the priority. If you want to take away resources from LibreOffice (PID: 8899) for example, you can assign it a lower priority number with renice 15 8899 .
3 xkill Helps you terminate graphical process. You can either type the command in the terminal or the run dialog box which changes the pointer into a cross-hair cursor. Now click on any non-responsive window to kill it. Right-click to dismiss xkill without killing a process.
4 dmidecode You can use the dmidecode command to know more details about your computer’s hardware. For example, use dmidecode -t 16 to list details about the physical memory. Try browsing the dmidecode man page for a comprehensive list of supported options. Once you get comfortable working with SSH, use sshfs to mount remote partitions. For example, sshfs user@remotehost:/home/bodhi /media/remotefs mounts the remote home directory under the local filesystem.