linuxPIPEpower

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

I have 2 directories which both have stuff in them:

• /home/user/folderApple

• /mnt/drive/folderBanana

I want to mount folderBanana onto folderApple like this:

sudo mount --bind "/mnt/drive/folderBanana" "/home/user/folderApple"

But I still want to be able to access the contents of folderApple while this is activated. From what I am reading, binding the original directory to a new location should make it available, like this:

mkdir "/home/user/folderApple-original"
sudo mount --bind  "/home/user/folderApple" "/home/user/folderApple-original"

But this just binds /mnt/drive/folderBanana to /home/user/folderApple-original as well. I tried reversing the order and result is the same.

How do I tell mount to look for the underlying directory?

I am happy to use symlinks or something else if it'll reliably get the job done, I am not wedded to this mechanism.

(The purpose of all this is that when an external drive is connected, I can have the storage conveniently available, but when it is not connected, the system will fallback to internal storage. But then I will want to move files between the fallback and external locations when both are available. So I need to see both locations at once.)

Is there anyway to pass terminal colors through a pipe?

As a simple example, ls -l --color=always | grep ii.

When you just run the ls -l --color=always part alone, you get the filenames color coded. But adding grep ii removes the color coding and just has the grep match highlighting.

Screenshot of both examples:

In the above example I would want ii.mp3 and ii.png filenames to retain the cyan and magenta highlighting, respectively. With or without the grep match highlighting.

Question is not specific to ls or grep.

If this is possible, is there a correct term/name for it? I am unable to locate anything.

Once again I try to get a handle of my various dotfiles and configs. This time I take another stab at gnu stow as it is often recommended. I do not understand it.

Here's how I understand it: I'm supposed to manually move all my files into a new directory where the original are. So for ~ I make like this:

~
  - dotfiles
      - bash
         dot-bashrc
         dot-bash_profile
      - xdg
            - dot-config
                user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
            - dot-config
                - tealdeer
                       config.toml

then cd ~/dotfiles && stow --dotfiles .

Then (if I very carefully created each directory tree) it will symlink those files back to where they came from like this:

~
  .bashrc
  .bash_profile
   - .config
        user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
          config.toml

I don't really understand what this application is doing because setting up the dotfiles directory is a lot more work than making symlinks afterwards. Every instructions tells me to make up this directory structure by hand but that seems to tedious with so many configs; isn't there some kind of automation to it?

Once the symlinks are created then what?

• Tutorials don't really mention it but the actual manual gives me the impression this is a packager manager in some way and that's confusing. Lots of stuff about compiling

• I see about how to combine it with git. Tried git-oriented dotfile systems before and they just aren't practical for me. And again I don't see what stow contributing; git would be doing all the work there.

• Is there anything here about sharing configs between non-identical devices? Not everything can be copy/pasted exactly. Are you supposed to be making git branches or something?

The manual is not gentle enough to learn from scratch. OTOH there are very very short tutorials which offer little information.

I feel that I'm really missing the magic that's obvious to everyone else.

Some packages install in under a minute, while alternatives which seem functionally similar, take hours.

Sometimes there are several available options to fit a use case and I would like to use it now. Is it possible to anticipate which one will likely be the fastest to get rolling?

Generally I like to install via yay.

Searching around here is what I learned. Agree?:

• AUR will be slower
• Certain categories of package, like web browser, are inherently slow
• Selecting -bin will be faster if available

Is there some way to guess beyond that? Certain programing languages take longer than others? Is it in relationship to existing packages on the system? Other characteristic? Some kind of dry-run feature to estimate?

Obviously I don't have the fastest computer. I have added MAKEFLAGS="-j4" to /etc/makepkg.conf so at least all 4 cores can get used.

Once I realize a package is going to take ages to get ready, is it possible to safely intervene to stop the process? I try to avoid it because in general I understand arch-based distros don't like "partial" installs. But is it safe to stop compiling? No changes have yet been made, right?

Title is TLDR. More info about what I'm trying to do below.

My daily driver computer is Laptop with an SSD. No possibility to expand.

So for storage of lots n lots of files, I have an old, low resource Desktop with a bunch of HDDs plugged in (mostly via USB).

I can access Desktop files via SSH/SFTP on the LAN. But it can be quite slow.

And sometimes (not too often; this isn't a main requirement) I take Laptop to use elsewhere. I do not plan to make Desktop available outside the network so I need to have a copy of required files on Laptop.

Therefor, sometimes I like to move the remote files from Desktop to Laptop to work on them. To make a sort of local cache. This could be individual files or directory trees.

But then I have a mess of duplication. Sometimes I forget to put the files back.

Seems like Laptop could be a lot more clever than I am and help with this. Like could it always fetch a remote file which is being edited and save it locally?

Is there any way to have Laptop fetch files, information about file trees, etc, located on Desktop when needed and smartly put them back after editing?

Or even keep some stuff around. Like lists of files, attributes, thumbnails etc. Even browsing the directory tree on Desktop can be slow sometimes.

I am not sure what this would be called.

Ideas and tools I am already comfortable with:

• rsync is the most obvious foundation to work from but I am not sure exactly what would be the best configuration and how to manage it.

• luckybackup is my favorite rsync GUI front end; it lets you save profiles, jobs etc which is sweet

• freeFileSync is another GUI front end I've used but I am preferring lucky/rsync these days

• I don't think git is a viable solution here because there are already git directories included, there are many non-text files, and some of the directory trees are so large that they would cause git to choke looking at all the files.

• syncthing might work. I've been having issues with it lately but I may have gotten these ironed out.

Something a little more transparent than the above would be cool but I am not sure if that exists?

Any help appreciated even just idea on what to web search for because I am stumped even on that.

Does anyone else find javascript/electron-based code editors confusing? I can never understand the organization/hierarchies of menus, buttons, windows, tabs. All my time is spent hunting through the interface. My kingdom for a normal dialogue box!

I've tried and failed to use VSCodium on a bunch of occasions for this reason. And a couple other ones. It's like the UI got left in the InstaPot waaaay too long and now it's just a soggy stewy mess.

Today I finally thought I'd take the first step toward android development. Completing a very simple hello world tutorial is proving to be challenging just because the window I see doesn't precisely correspond to the screenshots. Trying to find the buttons/menus/tools is very slow as I am constantly getting lost. I only ever have this in applications with javascript-based UIs

Questions:

1. Am I the only one who faces this challenge?

2. Do I have to use Android Studio or it there some kind of native linux alternative?

edited to reflect correction that Android Studio is not electron

I just noticed that eza can now display total disk space used by directories!

I think this is pretty cool. I wanted it for a long time.

There are other ways to get the information of course. But having it integrated with all the other options for listing directories is fab. eza has features like --git-awareness, --tree display, clickable --hyperlink, filetype --icons and other display, permissions, dates, ownerships, and other stuff. being able to mash everything together in any arbitrary way which is useful is handy. And of course you can --sort=size

docs:

  --total-size               show the size of a directory as the size of all
                             files and directories inside (unix only)

It also (optionally) color codes the information. Values measures in kb, mb, and gb are clear. Here is a screenshot to show that:

eza --long -h --total-size --sort=oldest --no-permissions --no-user

Of course it take a little while to load large directories so you will not want to use by default.

Looks like it was first implemented Oct 2023 with some fixes since then. (Changelog). PR #533 - feat: added recursive directory parser with `--total-size` flag by Xemptuous