Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.

src/* will skip hidden files. You want rsync -avAXUNH src/ dst which copies contents of src into dst. Notice the trailing slash in src/. Without the slash, src is copied into dst so you end up with a src directory in dst. The AXUNH enables preserving more things. You might also add --delete if you’re updating the copy.

PS. I should also mention how I end up with -avAXUNH. Simple:

$ man rsync |grep ' -. *preserve'
       --hard-links, -H         preserve hard links
       --perms, -p              preserve permissions
       --executability, -E      preserve executability
       --acls, -A               preserve ACLs (implies --perms)
       --xattrs, -X             preserve extended attributes
       --owner, -o              preserve owner (super-user only)
       --group, -g              preserve group
       --times, -t              preserve modification times
       --atimes, -U             preserve access (use) times
       --crtimes, -N            preserve create times (newness)

and then include all that. a covers some of those options and those don’t have to be set explicitly:

$ man rsync |grep ' -a ' |head -n1
       --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)

What others wrote except don’t use dd. Use rsync or make a backup with tar. dd will waste time reading unallocated regions of the disk.

I meant what’s the link to use since the same Lemmy post can be viewed through different instances and on each it has a different URL. It’s a bit user-hostile that the link gets you out of your instance (unless you’re on the same instance as author of the post).

Yeah, my bad. I should have linked to the previous post: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/32637183 (not entirely sure what’s the etiquette for linking to posts on Lemmy is).

Yeah, it’s a bit philosophical.

• In graphical applications, Ctrl+M, Ctrl+J and Return/Enter are all different things.
• In a terminal in raw mode, Ctrl+M and Return/Enter are the same thing but Ctrl+J is something different. You can for example run bind -x '"\C-j":"echo a"' in bash and Ctrl+J will do something different.
• In a terminal in canonical mode, they are all the same thing. There probably are some stty options which can change that though.

Yes. So is Ctrl+J actually. Ctrl+J corresponds to line feed (LF) and Ctrl+M corresponds to carriage return (CR) ASCII characters. They are typically treated the same way.

Yes, I agree. But the dispute is what ‘sends EOF’ actually means. The article I respond to claims Ctrl+D doesn’t send EOF but is like Enter except that new line character is not sent. This is, in some sense true, but as I explain also misleading.

You could pass $1 and $got through $(realpath -P -- ...) to make sure all the path are in canonical form. Though now that I’m thinking about it, stat is probably a better option anyway:

want=/path/to/target/dir
pattern=$(stat -c^%d:%i: -- "$want")
find "$HOME" -type l -exec stat -Lc%d:%i:%n {} + | grep "$pattern"

You want readlink -f rather than ls -l. ++OK, actually not exactly. readlink won’t print path to the symlink so it’s not as straightforward.++

Also, you want + in find ... -exec ... + rather than ;.

At this point I feel committed to making readlink work. ;) Here’s the script you want:

#!/bin/sh

want=$1
shift
readlink -f -- "$@" | while read got; do
	if [ "$got" = "$want" ]; then
		echo "$1"
	fi
	shift
done

and execute it as:

find ~ -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script /path/to/target/dir {} +

I’ve Pulse 14 with plain Debian installation and so far didn’t notice any issues. Though admittedly, I’m not a heavy laptop user. Your mileage may vary I guess.

Tuxedo

I used Claws Mail at some point in the past. Now notmuch+Emacs.

Why do you think it would affect performance?

You cannot write setuid scripts. It must be a binary.

Which is why I haven’t wrote ‘EOF character’, ‘EOT’ or ‘EOT character’. Neither have I claimed that \x4 character is interpreted by the shell as end of file.

Edit: Actually, I did say ‘EOF character’ originally (though I still haven’t claimed that it sends EOF character to the program). I’ve updated the comment to clear things up more.

Sure, though I advise against it. The following C program can do that:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	if (argc < 2) {
		fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s <command> <args>...", argv[0]);
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	printf("Executing");
	for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i) {
		printf(" %s", argv[i]);
	}
	puts("\nPress ^C to abort.");
	sleep(5);

	if (setuid(0)) {
		perror("setuid");
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	execvp(argv[1], argv + 1);
	perror(argv[1]);
	return EXIT_FAILURE;
}

As seen in:

$ gcc -O2 -o delay-su delay-su.c
$ sudo chown root:sudo delay-su
$ sudo chmod 4750 delay-su
$ ./delay-su id
$ id -u
1000
$ ./delay-su id -u
Executing id -u
^C to abort
0

This will allow anyone in group sudo to execute any command as root. You may change the group to something else to control who exactly can run the program (you cannot change the user of the program).

If there’s some specific command you want to run, it’s better to hard-code it or configure sudo to allow execution of that command without password.

It’s not. You keep insisting that ^D doesn’t send EOF and yet:

$ stty -a | grep eof
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
$ man stty |grep -A1 eof |head -n2
       eof CHAR
              CHAR will send an end of file (terminate the input)

^D (which is an ASCII EOT character) signals EOF. The thing is that in C every line of a text file must be terminated by a new-line. And so, when you end a file with ^D without a return, you get funky results.