More little tips and tricks

Updating a previous blog entry:

To keep the terminal available even after launching an application, append the command with &. Ex: nautilus &
To launch an application from a terminal and keep the application running even upon closing the terminal, add nohup before the command. Can be used with the previous tip. Ex: nohup nautilus &
which returns the pathnames of the files which would be executed in the current environment (from man which). Meaning if you have installed a package and you do not know how to start it, which will return the full path and name of the executable file

sudo ln -s /home/your_login/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s /home/your_login/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -s /home/your_login/.fonts /root/.fonts

will have root applications use your user theme, icons and fonts (replace your_login with your user login)

Posted on April 15, 2007 at 16:18 in Ubuntu, Ubuntu [en] | RSS feed | Respond | Trackback URL

Carl van Tonder
April 16, 2007 at 0:24

Your first two tips are the wrong way ’round, I think.

command &
is the equivalent of Ctrl+Z then bg during a program; it runs it as a background job. If you close the terminal, the program dies too.

nohup command
prevents command from being treated as a sub-process of the shell running it. Hence you can open gnome-terminal, run `nohup gedit`, close the terminal, and gedit will still be running.
bapoumba
April 16, 2007 at 0:34

Hello Carl,
You are right :/
Sorry, I edit that right away. Thanks a lot.
Carl van Tonder
April 16, 2007 at 1:02

No problem. The tip about root themes was certainly handy. And `which` was the one tool I probably wasn’t using enough (though you may want to mention whatis, because it’s also pretty handy.

b-initials