Linux

I didn’t get to spend as much time tinkering and learning this week, but I still learned some new things!

1. Wireguard is great! I had been using OpenVPN because when I initially set up my machine, my VPN had a bug with Wireguard. I was setting up a raspberry pi today for some more tinkering, and I decided to try Wireguard to see if the bug was fixed. Not only is it fixed, but Wireguard is much easier to work with. Not hating on OpenVPN, but I’ll definitely be preferring Wireguard going forward.
2. Proper use of find, particularly with regex. This is ongoing. I’ve been using find for awhile, but not with full understanding of it’s options and syntax. I’m starting to get a better understanding of how to use it to find and manipulate the files I’m looking for. One of the biggest things that’s tripping me up with find and regex is designating the path.
3. How to set up a new user. This was interesting. I already knew the basics, adduser -m username, sudo passwd username, but what I didn’t know anything about was --skel for copying over the skeleton shell config files. I didn’t even know the skeleton config files existed.
4. The shell prompt can be customized. This was interesting. I was setting up a non root user on a vps that I have, and after creating the user, all I had was the $ prompt. No user@host, and no working directory. After some reading I found that adding PS1='$(whoami)@$(hostname):$(pwd)$ ' to ~/.profile will show a more traditional user@host:working/directory$ prompt. I’m sure this is not the only way to do this, and may not be the best way to do it, but based on my limited knowledge, it is the way that I’m currently doing it on my vps.