Finding all the executables/binary in Linux rpm based distro.

I have been thinking about this for quite sometime now, how to find all the executables on the linux system. One of the way is to do a ”ls” on all the directories in the PATH variable. But that will not list the executables that are outside of the PATH. So, I wrote this one liner :

rpm -qal |agrep ”bin\/” > all_execs

This will list all the files in the Linux system in bin or sbin directory and that should be pretty much all the binaries in the system.

Fedora 12 demonstrates sandbox for desktop applications

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Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) specialist and Red Hat developer Dan Walsh has souped up the security mechanisms in Fedora and SELinux by adding a desktop sandbox which he&#8217;s calling “sandbox -X”. Users can run desktop applications of their choice inside his sandbox, which then protects the underlying system from any possible damage.

A browser started inside the sandbox is unable to damage the host system.
SELinux extends the standard Unix privileges concept to add a role-based privilege model which, in principal, allows a user to forbid a PDF viewer from, for example, sending email. Currently, however, SELinux is mainly used to wall off server services.
<a HREF="http://www.h-online.com/security/Fedora-12-demonstrates-sandbox-for-desktop-applications–/news/114298">read more <table CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%">

Some Rather Old But Still Funny Anti-UNIX Jokes (One Liners)

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/unix-jokes1.jpg"><img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/unix-jokes1.jpg" alt="" align="bottom" />You may have heard a lot of anti-<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/microsoft" title="Microsoft" rel="homepage" href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft jokes before since you can read them everywhere. However, it&#8217;s pretty rare to find anti-UNIX/Linux jokes. So I would like to share with you some pretty old but still funny anti-UNIX one-liners. Enjoy!

• If <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/unix" title="Unix" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix">Unix is the answer, then it must have been a stupid question.

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Nifty Things to Do with GIMP

Nifty Things to Do with GIMP Some of us are probably addicted to capturing moments in pictures. I can understand why. It’s one of those things that help us go back to the good old days, so to speak. It’s also something that creates a ‘time machine’ for us because those pictures show us what things looked like, not just remind us of the feeling but give us the atmosphere all over again.

query and downgrade selected packages based on version or repository

If you have worked on rpm based distro then you know how difficult it is to downgrade packages. And unluckily I upgraded some packages to fc12 and was still on FC11. Completely my mistake while doing some R&D. Anyway to downgrade I had to device some mechanism and here it is:

rpm -qa –qf &#8221;%-30{NAME}%-20{RELEASE}\n&#8221; |grep fc12 |awk '{print $1}&#8217;|tr &#8217;\n&#8217; &#8217; &#8217; >downgrade

yum downgrade `cat downgrade`

EncFS – Simple article to use Encrypted filesystem in Linux

A nice article here

EncFS is an easy-to-use, command-line tool for storing information in encrypted form. It’s not really a file-system, but it pretends to be one at the CLI. If you’ve been searching for a means of encrypting and decrypting your sensitive data easily, here it is.
User Level: Intermediate
EncFS is included with the distribution I’m using on the desktop, Ubuntu Dapper, so all I needed to do to install it was a few clicks in Synaptic. Look for the encfs package, and select if for installation. It should pull down all of the dependencies for the system. If you’re not so lucky, and your distro doesn’t include EncFS packages, you can download the latest tarball from a here and build it from the source. See the EncFS site for a dependencies.

Initialization or clearing of log files

Like all Unix file systems, open log files can cause a real problem when they get too large and need to be deleted. The problem is, if you delete an open file, the link is removed, but all of the inodes are lost. Even worse, if the program continues to log to the file, the link never re-appears, and additional inodes are lost and are unrecoverable. I suggest two solutions to the above problems.