Category: Tips

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High Performance USB stick formatting with ext4

To format my USB sticks that I use following set of commands:

Assuming my USB stick is recognized as sdc, and has a primary partition created this is the set of commands that I use:

# create ext4 filesystem without journal
 mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdc1

# give your newly formatted partition a name
 e2label /dev/sdc1 storage

# Use data mode for filesystem as writeback for better performance
 tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdc1 

# Disable reserved space on my 57GB drive it wastes 5% which is 3GB
 tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1
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Change default editor in Debian and debian-like distributions

To check which editor is set as default in your Debian distro you can do two things:

  1. in your favorite shell press CTRL+X+CTRL+E which will launch your default editor or
  2. use command update-alternatives –list-editor to list installed editors and you can expect result similar like this one:
# update-alternatives --list editor
 /bin/nano
 /usr/bin/mcedit
 /usr/bin/vim.basic

To set for example vim.basic as your default editor you can use following command:

# update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.basic
 update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/vim.basic to provide /usr/bin/editor (editor) in manual mode

Now if you again quick launch your editor with CTRL+X+CTRL+E you will notice that vim is invoked.

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Useful shell shortcuts

Here are some useful shell shortcuts that you can use to make your life easier:

CTRL+A - move to beginning of line
CTRL+E - move to the end of the line
CTRL+B - move backward
CTRL+F - move forward
CTRL+D - delete character under cursor
CTRL+K - deletes text from cursor to the end of line
CTRL+X+BACKSPACE - delete text from cursor to the beginning of the line
CTRL+T - exchange character under cursor with previous character
ESC+T - exchange two words before and under cursor
ESC+U - converts text from cursor to the end of the word to UPPERCASE
ESC+L - converts text from cursor to the end of the word to LOWERCASE
CTRL+X+CTRL+E - launch default editor
CTRL+L - Clears screen above current line
CTRL+W - Delete word from cursor position to the left
CTRL+R - Search through command history