Hi! I’m Alex, a.k.a. Ultra. I use NixOS btw. Gen Z, Romanian.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Do I also understand right that file extensions aren’t anything more than the file name?

    For the kernel, yeah. A lot of apps use them, though, but mostly for determining whet kind of text plain text files are.

    But files have some “mode bits” at the start, hwich tell the kernel if they’re executable, and whether they should always have root (admin) perms.

    Speaking of root, that’s the user with full perms. Root can access any file on the system, and can basically do anything. Root is also known as the superuser. When you use sudo, you run the program as root (it stands for “Super User DO”).

    Thanks!

    You’re very welcome!


  • Yup, Pi OS is Debian with a few custom configs and (I think) the pixel desktop environment (though they might have changed it to Wayfire).

    Btw, in Linux, everything is a file. Some are in /sys and /proc for the kernel, others in /dev for devices. So you can do neat stuff like changing your backlight by printing a number to a special file!

    Also, commands have 3 streams: stdin (standard input, usually keyboard), stdout (standard output, usually terminal), and stderr (standard error, output, almost always terminal). You can often pipe programs, so one’s stdout goes to another’s stdin. Stderr is used for human-readable errors and is usually not piped.

    Combining the last 2 things, if you pipe a program into /dev/null (which is like an infinite void or a trashcan), it’s like ignoring its output.