No, I’m not. Relax. 
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No — see, this is where you are following the wrong train of thought.
The shell has no idea what you want to achieve. The shell accepts commands and attempts to execute them, but it does not know what the command does.
In other words, to the shell, “success” — which gives you an exit code of 0 — means that the command was syntactically sane enough to get executed, and anything with an error code higher than 0 means that there was an issue executing the command as entered by you.
Okay, here again you are following the same line of erroneous thinking. The shell won’t glitch out — if it did, then that would be a serious bug — but the command you give it may be dangerous.
So, the proper course of action is to think about what exactly you are telling the shell to do. Think of the command you are entering, and think logically.
- Does the command perform a calculation?
- Does the command engage in variable substitution and/or must it interpret globbing characters?
- Is it a compound command that takes the output from one command as the input of another command, or as a value to act upon?
- And if it must act upon such a value, which action are you telling it to perform?
There are some good online tutorials about the use of the shell, but the problem here is that most distributions still use bash, and this is also still true for Manjaro at the system level, but inside konsole and other terminal emulators in a graphical environment, the three official editions of Manjaro — i.e. the Plasma editiion, the Xfce edition and the GNOME edition — have for a while already been using zsh, which is an entirely different shell.
zsh is compatible with the syntax and instructions of the original Bourne Shell — commonly invoked as sh — but zsh is not a POSIX-compatible shell. bash on the other hand has many additional functions not present in the POSIX standard, but it is nevertheless fully POSIX-compatible.
POSIX is an international standard that dictates the behavior of UNIX systems with the emphasis on portability. In other words, shell commands and scripts written according to the POSIX specification can be used on other UNIX systems that are POSIX-compatible, whereas in the case of zsh, you can only use those scripts on another UNIX system if it also has zsh installed.
The shell, lastly, is the command and script interpreter. It provides you with a prompt — and the colored prompt with the special characters you see in a konsole window is the result of a separate package — powerlevel10k — which specifically initializes that kind of prompt for a zsh environment.
Every shell also uses its own configuration files, and through those, its own set of initialized environment variables when logging into said shell or invoking it otherwise. There is even a difference in how the shell is invoked, i.e. interactive versus non-interactive, and login shell versus non-login shell.
These are all concepts you really have to understand to the fullest if you want to start using the shell on a regular basis.
A UNIX shell is quite a lot more powerful than the legacy DOS prompt that you get in MS-Windows, and a lot more sensible and logical than Microsoft’s “PowerShell”. UNIX shells are also text-based, whereas PowerShell works with objects. That’s an entirely different paradigm.
Either way, the bottom line is that the shell won’t glitch. If anything glitches, then it’s the command itself that you feed to the shell, due to a syntax error or — more commonly, even — a misinterpretation of the syntax.
Trust me, I’ve been exclusively using GNU/Linux for now about 25 years, and I’ve worked with UNIX on minicomputers — think: small mainframes — from the early 1990s until the mid 1990s, and even I still goof up with my syntax every once in a while.
A single typo can have far-reaching consequences. And a bad keyboard — like the one I’m using right now, grrrr! — can really help you mess things up in that regard.
UNIX really does require you to keep your wits about you. It has no mercy. It does exactly what you tell it to do, even if you tell it to do something other than what you thought you were telling it to do.
That’s your opinion, but apparently not the opinion of the people who designed UNIX. And it’s all simply down to the paradigm. UNIX is very logical and easy to understand if you think and act logically. But people coming from the Windows world have been conditioned to think in different terms.
That said however, if there is an actual error, then the shell will report it. But that error may not be what you expect it to be.
You may mess up your system and expect the shell to tell you “Oh no, you’ve just deleted your entire home directory” when the instruction to delete your home directory was syntactically correct, and thus the shell executed it just as you had told it to.
It’s a machine, not a person. It doesn’t think, and it doesn’t ask “Are you sure about that, Ridge¹?”, with a 20-second zoom in on its face. And it also doesn’t say… 
But your logic dwells in the wrong paradigm. It will throw up an error message if you gave it an erroneous command. It will not throw up an error message based upon what you — as a sapient biological life form — may think would have been wrong.
You can always keep some bookmarks to online documentation handy. Also, your system contains man pages, for every command, and the command apropos followed by a keyword will give you a list of man pages pertaining to information you might be looking for.
Wrong paradigm, again. konsole is a terminal emulator. It doesn’t execute any commands.
The shell is what presents you with a command prompt, and what executes the commands you give it.
And by default in Manjaro, the shell running inside a graphical terminal emulator is zsh, but you can switch this out for bash if you want — I have, and I’m not the only one either — and outside of the GUI environment, when logging in at a tty (“virtual console”), and at the system level, the shell is still bash. Which makes a lot of sense, because zsh works well as an interactive shell, but bash is — by virtue of being POSIX-compatible — a much better shell for scripting.
I’ve already seen a lot over here, but I haven’t come across any of those yet. 
Welcome to the club. That actually applies for just about half of the population here, yours truly included. 
Ah, but what if you misinterpreted their reaction in the first place? Then you end up sending a disproportionate response into the world, killing off innocent kittens and puppies — and possibly people who identify as kittens or puppies. 
Oddly enough, I have often been accused of such at another venue where until recently I was an administrator. But then again, those accusing me of such have not known my predecessors, who had far less patience than I do, and furthermore, in the case of the plaintiffs, the following mantra was all too true…
Even if there is no visible output, then there is still an implicit one, namely the absence of errors. Anything else will yield output.
A professional tip could be to add the exit code of the previous command to your prompt, but this is generally above the heads of 99% of the population here at the forum.
Every process has an exit code. 0 means success. Anything higher means that there was an error. 1 usually denotes a syntax error, but there could be other errors, like an I/O error — e.g. file not found, or you don’t have access to that file/directory — and so on.
So if you add the exit code to the prompt, then after each command, you will get a more visual clue as to whether your command was successful or not, and if not, what the problem may have been.
But you don’t have to do that, of course. The general idea is that if there is no output, then whatever you told it to do will have succeeded from the shell’s point of view. And from the shell’s point of view, you are merely giving it literal instructions.
¹ For those of you brave enough to have suffered at last a couple of episodes of “The Bold and the Beautiful” 
You saw what I entered, and what I got back in return, It gave me nothing, it just pushed to the next line with no output at all, no exit code, no error code, just
I get what you’re saying that it doesn’t have some big AI style interface that understands the nuances of what I want outta it. I’m just suggesting a konsole-based return (IE: an output), for when it does perform an action. Call me nuts, but that, to me, just seems like a basic bare minimum quality of life feature that shoulda shipped with the beta.
In a way that may make it easier to understand, you’re likely used to it, after (I’m guessing) spending a lifetime with this OS. This is comparable how most people are used to Capitalism. But as many of us have realised (especially in the last few years), just because you’re used to something, doesn’t mean it’s the best way, objectively speaking.
More and more I’m coming to the conclusion that you’ve pretty much gotta be a computer programmer just to have Linux as an OS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against learning, but I’ve gotta do it at my own pace and in my own way, or it’s just gonna overwhelm and bore me, then I’ll end up back in Windblows hating my life.
I mean, my first statement past the title, was that I’m new to Linux, so what percentage chance do you think there is, logically speaking, that I know what a globbing character is. To me that just sounds like gross letters, lol. I mean, I could ask ChatGPT and get a consice and accurate explanation of it but I’m just sayin, also, that seems like a lot of personal (biological) computations to make just for entering a command into konsole. I mean, I’m not typically trying to add information to the kernel here.
Most of what I do is to attempt to add required programs and dependencies in order to maintain a stable and functional system.
Honestly, my biggest gripe right now is the dumb sh** Linux does when you install/remove/reinstall programs… Primarily in regards to dependencies. I mean, technically Windows has dependenies too, called DLL’s, but when you uninstall/reinstall/update a program, it doesn’t gut your DLL’s or start uninstalling/reinstalling unrelated system drivers…
I accepted an update for Discord from the GUI add/remove programs thing, should’a been a simple easy, care-free task, upgrade, watch a little progress bar go for a few seconds, launch Discord again, in the updated version. Nope! Halfway into the update/reinstall, it decided to reinstall my Nvidia driver… For… reasons…
spent half an hr making a meme for all this, but these stupidass forum restrictions won’t even let me post an external link to the general page it’s on on another website, or upload the image itself… “Can’t embed [Duh!] media[DERP!]”
sorry, only temporarily irritated atm. few things grind my gears more than stuff that should be simplistic, being made a rotten pain in the a** for arbitrary reasons.
On a lighter note, Gimp has gotten really damn good since the last time I used it… Wish I’d rediscovered it while I was still actively using my graphic tablet.
To be fair, even an unintended typo can cause a glitch, and as humans, even the best of us will error sometimes in that regard, so that’s why console output is important.
Dang. Kinda assumed that KDE was considered official, given that I got it right from the Manjaro site. That may be where a small layer of my errors have come from, as I imagine the ‘official’ Manjaro spins likely have more support.
Incidentally, I did try fedora KDE for a bit, also Gnome… Fedora was a ■■■■■■■■■■■ that made Manjaro seem rigidly stable in contrast. I didn’t hate it, when it worked, but overall I’ve had a much better experience in Manjaro. Also, I tried Gnome for about a day… Maybe 2… Hated it. It might be good for a tablet, but way too fisher price for my liking. I mean, I didn’t hate the ascetic, it looked nice enough, but more the general navigation of the system just felt off…
I got a raspberry pi tucked away somewhere, that small? Lol…
FYI, I’m not actually trying to be redundant, I’m responding to this as I read it, lol…
I got an old keyboard myself, nearing about 8-10 years of age. But it’s a 200$ Corsair with mechanical RGB keys, and the keys are replaceable and the base is made of metal. So, quite frankly, the thing will probably be driven into obsolescence via lack of driver support long before it actually bites the dust physically.
Seriously though, I know the economy is trash right now, but you can’t afford 20 bux for a new keyboard (Almost said 10… Bet ya can’t get one for 10 anymore… Maybe not even for 20)? Mind ya, the economy is bad enough that it’s actually realistic that 30 bux could put ya out if ya don’t have a stable source of income that isn’t government funding.
Like I say, I get that that’s the way it is, but hardly the ideal. Look at it this way, would it in some way harm people to have that additional output? Even you admitted, mistakes happen. When they happen for you, wouldn’t you have preferred that the console have released that output so that you could know right away, as opposed to waiting until your system goes tits up?
The way I measure objective facts, at least in the context of this type of thing that’s largely opinion-based, is that if having it one way would benefit most people on one side of the fence, without harming anyone on the other side, then it is solid, and if having it the other way will cause distress to many people on the one side of the fence, while making no difference to the other side, then the facts kinda speak for themselves…
It’s comparable to people that have those subs vs dubs arguments. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that those are insanely stupid arguments, cuz having stuff dubbed doesn’t harm those that want it subbed in any sort of way. But they act like if it’s dubbed, that they’re somehow gonna undo the fact that it’s still released in the original language with subs. there’s just no 3 dimensional thought going on with people in this world… We life in 3 dimensions, but people seem to think in 1-2 dimensions.
NGL buddy, that’s fkin mental… When I first started using Linux, I couldn’t click a folder without the thing asking me to re-enter my password. Yet, it’ll delete a vital directory without even telling you? Was Linux designed by mentally handicapped monkeys?
Worst excuse ever. It was still designed by a human, and therefore, has the FULL capability to imitate a human in nearly every sense. I’ve been deep into AI lately, and sure, that’s fairly new, and still in it’s development phase, but the code it takes to output commands to terminal, is something we’ve known for ages. It’s a simple matter of if, else, etc, statements, and maybe not even that, maybe just a core level command telling the terminal to output all human-relevant data to the terminal.
Side note, I’m sure you’ll think I’m a moron for this one, but really, no harm was done, but I deff had a WTH moment earlier, when I entered grep -r kernel , into konsole and hit enter. Once it started flooding my konsole with random numbers I just hit the X and was done with that.
OK, I’m still new here, so giving the benefit of the doubt to some extent, but based on what I do know, is it not possible to write a script that will log all underlying terminal processes to a log file? Then retrieve the relevant parts of that log file with another script?
If those two things are possible, then theoretically, konsole could have been programmed to do just what I’m talking about. The only way in which this would not be true is if the terminal processed ZERO human readable data in the fulfilment of your command. But that is much less likely with Python, java, or C++, than with the token-based AI OS’s we’ll likely be presented with in the future (which deal with far more mathematical computations, as well as employing three dimensional datasets). Although, I imagine those systems would be inherently much more user friendly.
Yep, be nice when the rest of the world finally learns that autistic = smart, not autistic = ret*rded. Things have improved a little bit, But I’m still white and male, which ain’t quite the party it was in the 50-60’s(which I wasn’t alive for), also physically unattractive, which was never a party at any point in history, but 10x worse since every woman has access to every straight/eligible man in the world in her pocket.
Had a feeling you was autistic though, only autistic people can write novels into forums and comment sections. Most other people are all “I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Cuz it’s difficult for them to compute anything longer than a Tweet.
Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. But in my experience of recent years, I tend to be right more often than I’m wrong(In most things). Age, wisdom, getting the autism diagnosis kinda helped me to find myself, so to speak, and focus on my strengths. Also to get on disability so I can be driven into an early gravy by my perpetually sedentary lifestyle, instead of by the stress of working dead end jobs and getting treated like a slave for pennys.
I’m not much the homicidal type, only person I wish dead on a daily basis is Doug Ford. I have a specific request to the divine whatevers for him to choke on a hotdog and die. Painfully and in a most embarrassing manner(Preferably, but I’ll take it without those bonuses).
You said this before, but I showed you an example there, just
next line, no exit code hidden there that I could see, unless there’s some command I have to type in to see the exit code, or if that’s a setting in Konsole settings that I overlooked, or if it’s something that pops up momentarily at the top of the konsole titlebar when it happens, Either way, you’ll have to be more --verbose in your meaning regarding that. It’s not that I’m too dumb to get it, but I have to know what an exit code is in order to add it to a prompt, unless I’m just taking blind guesses. Brute forcing the exit code, lol…
Because the command you gave it was a no-op. It didn’t actually do anything.
Nearly 25 years of exclusively using GNU/Linux, and some minor experience with UNIX before that.
GNU/Linux is a UNIX system, and UNIX was designed as a general-purpose multitasking and multi-user operating system for minicomputers and mainframes that served multiple concurrent user logins.
It was not designed as a consumerist operating system for appliances, even though the code of GNU/Linux is actually so good that it is effectively being used on such appliances as well.
In UNIX we call them globbing characters. Microsoft calls them “wildcards”.
GNU/Linux doesn’t do that either, but your problems are with the Nvidia drivers, and that is for most part still proprietary software. (And out of my league — I have Intel onboard graphics.)
discord is proprietary software. The best way to use it on GNU/Linux is as a Snap or FlatPak, so that it’s containerized. Besides, discord’s forced update policy sucks.
The onus of not making typos is on the biological unit between the keyboard and the chair.
It is, but it isn’t called KDE anymore. It is called Plasma. The name KDE is only used anymore for the organization that develops that desktop environment and its applications.
A minicomputer was large enough to fill up an entire wall in a room, but it was called “minicomputer” because the only other type that existed at the time when minicomputers were introduced was a mainframe, which filled up an entire floor in the building.
Nowadays, mainframes are only the size of a small minicomputer anymore, and minicomputers themselves have been phased out in favor of so-called midrange servers.
The system does log most of what it’s doing, and you can even watch some of it in real-time if you press Ctrl+Alt+F12. That’s the system logger virtual console — output only, no input.
GNU/Linux uses virtual consoles, which you can switch between with Ctrl+Alt+F{1…12}.
Depending on your graphical environment, the GUI will run on one of the first virtual consoles. The others will usually present you with a character-mode-only login prompt. And those are called ttys. You can switch between them at any time using the aforementioned key combinations.
Try it.
It will only ask you for a password if and when you’re trying to do something that requires superuser privileges.
That depends on whether you have the privileges to do so. Normally, unprivileged users only have write access to their home directory, to /tmp, and to /var/tmp. And in some cases, if you’re running a local mail server, then you’ll also have write access to /var/spool/mail/$USER, whereby $USER is your login.
It wasn’t designed for that purpose. It was designed for people who knew what they were doing, and back in those days, almost everyone pecking away at a keyboard had a degree in computer science.
The system does keep logs of most things. See the man page…
man journalctl
I don’t know how to do it in zsh — and especially not without ruining the customized zsh prompt you get in Manjaro — but in bash it’s trivial to add it to your command prompt. See the bash manual…
man bash
Hint: Look for the definition of the PS1 variable — that’s your primary command prompt (in bash).
Counterargument:
Or… It did something, and succeeded, as per your statements in previous responses. But I can’t tell which of those it did. The key element of any relationship is good communication, and Konsole is not good at relationships. Being facetious btw. Yes, I get that console is not human, again, the point is, it would be beneficial to have output.
Well, yes, not all users of Linux should be expected to have the same patience for it’s lack of transparency in konsole due to a lifetime of using it. FYI, my frustrations here go beyond personal. The reason why everyone still uses windblows is because it’s easy to use, and doesn’t do stuff that any user with a fresh point of view would find blatantly stupid.
I’m not saying it should be locked down and gated off the way that windows is. But, there should be a way to strike a better balance in an OS that’s so completely customizable. Idk, maybe that’s what Ubuntu is, and I’m just b*tchin for nothin. But, I’d honestly like it if more people went open source, and shed the shackles of corporate ownership.
I personally shied away from Ubuntu though, cuz it’s too mainstream, and I did want something with no limitations. For my current main use case though, I may have to go mainstream in order to maximise stability, not sure yet though, still gotta buy my computer first.
Yea, pretty sure smart fridges prob have some derivative of android on em…
I know what a wildcard is in AI art generation, but I don’t suppose that’s any relation.
You just made me very sad in pants. If I had more money, I’d offer you a hand up (not to be confused with a ‘handy’, you’d have to pay me for that).
Now that’s some information I can make use of. I’ll consider that from now on.
You’re telling me. Stupid thing. I wouldn’t have even clicked the update button if it wasn’t forcing me to update before I could run it. Truthfully, I’m considering an open source version, not as featured, so I hear, but at least prob won’t pull that crap.
Linux may not be a human, but WE are, typos WILL happen. You even said it yourself. You’re kinda working against your own logic by arguing that, lol.
Yea, still got a lot to learn in the way of distros. I’m gonna open up another thread here in a bit asking about which distro is best suited for stably running a system built for offline AI training, as well as which hardware is most recommended for such a system. The one thing I do know, is that I don’t want to spend the bulk of my time fixing random nonsense. There’s far too much to be learned. I need an environment that’s excessively flexible, but also rigidly stable.
Cuz when I learn more, I plan on scripting a lot, and maybe even(ideally) making my own programs. But, between that, and learning the AI software, Linux, coding, scripting, java, tokenization, etc., etc., etc. Well, There’s a lot.
Pretty sure google would still have a mainframe, no?
Yes, thank you for that… A small caveat perhaps that this command does not work within the GUI, and in fact logs you into terminal. I’ve been in the terminal before, but it’s a bit more jarring when going there unexpectedly. A learning experience none the less. Though still not 100% clear on how the real time logger watching works. when it sent me to terminal, I entered my login information, and it was just like the terminal I went into in fedora (prob the exact same thing tbh) when I was attempting to fix my display adapter.
But I didn’t see any logging information, unless you meant that the background terminal actually offers the more verbose output that I’ve been suggesting this whole time. Cuz to be fair, I didn’t enter any commands, I just looked for how to get back to here so I could finish typing this message.
I wanna try something… Fk-off . Nice… I gotta find That key on my keyboard.
Apparently F2 for me. So, what is it that runs on the other 10ish keys? I hit F1 first and there was just a tiny blinking cursor in the upper left. Couldn’t do nothin with that though.
It seems to have been a lot better in Manjaro than Fedora, but I know at one point I was getting prompted for a password for EVERYTHING… open browser, password, move a file (to a non-system folder) password, everything in Konsole, password. open my drive I had windows on, password, ect., etc., etc. Idk, maybe I somehow ended up on a lower user level or something. I haven’t had that experience since installing this Manjaro, but in fedora, it was so bad, that I got ChatGPT to help me alter scripts to make me always be root user, lol… Which, stupidly enough, felt even more restrictive in many ways.
But the thing that pushed me over the edge in that case, was that the permissions were so restrictive that even the project/program I was trying to run was failing because it didn’t have enough permissions to function correctly.
Since a lot of programs refuse to let you run them as root, and a lot of other stuff will blast you with warnings just because you’re root. I get the reasoning behind it, still just felt counter-intuitive in terms of being a top-level user.
Fair, but also doesn’t negate the fact that humans still error, and output is helpful in mitigating the potential detriments from those little inevitabilities.
Down with the patriarchy! why isn’t there a WOMAN page, huh!?
JK though, lol… Seriously though, women have everything else, let Linux be a man thing XD
On a serious note, entered that command, and yea, that info could be helpful in better understanding some stuff. I’ve used a lot of the commands in there before.
Sexist…
You’ve said many times that you have run UNIX/GNU for, since the beginning of time, let’s say. But, I forget if you’ve bentioned which distros you’ve used. Well, which have you used, and if you don’t mind going into a little detail, what did you like/dislike about each one?
Yes, it did do something — it ran an eval command — but it didn’t do anything with that. If you know what eval does, you will understand why.
man eval
Tip: Even though eval has its uses — if used correctly — almost every UNIX admin will tell you to not use it, because there are usually much better (and more predictable) ways of doing something.
eval is usually used in an XY problem situation — having the wrong idea on how to go about a certain task and then seeking advice on how to implement this wrong idea.
You’re still in XY land. konsole is only a terminal emulator. Shell commands have nothing to do with the terminal; they are executed by the shell.
You really have to learn the basics if you hope to ever understand how the system works.
I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. For someone who has never seen a computer from up close, UNIX is infinitely more logical than MS-Windows, and therefore, much easier to come to grips with.
Microsoft and Apple have both perverted people’s expectations of what a computer is, how it works, and what it can do.
A wildcard or globbing character is a character that, when used in a command sequence, resolves to one or multiple other characters. For instance, the globbing character “*” in the command below…
ls *.txt
… will list every file in the current working directory whose name ends in “.txt”.
I am perfectly happy with my onboard Intel graphics. They do all that I need them to do and I don’t need any proprietary driver to get them to work properly.
As for “handy”, I don’t know what that means. In the 1990s, the Germans used it as a nickname for a cellphone, but I have also seen it used as a nickname for a portable video camera — the Sony Handycam springs to mind.
I’m not arguing it. I am telling you to own up to it.
No, they are using supercomputers and racks of blade servers at data centers.
A supercomputer is a logical computer that physically comprises multiple — usually hundreds or even thousands — of individual computers.
That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. What you call a terminal is a virtual console.
I’m guessing that “logging to console” is still not enabled by default then — I was under the impression that it was.
You enable it by modifying the file /etc/systemd/journald.conf. Look for the two lines similar to these below…
ForwardToConsole=yes
TTYPath=/dev/tty12
… and make them as I have entered them here. If there is a"#" in front of the line, remove it — it turns what’s on the line into merely a text comment, and so you have to activate and/or modify the option.
The first option will probably be commented out, and the second one will be commented out and have a different value.
After saving the fire, reboot, and you should now have a logging system console at tty12 — Ctrl+Alt+F12.
Yes, Plasma will by default run on either tty1 or tty2 — it’s bit random.
A getty, or otherwise put, a character-mode virtual console.
Yes, as I said, it’s random. Sometimes it runs at tty1, sometimes it runs at tty2.
If so, then that would not have been related to your privileges, but rather to a password manager. In Plasma, this will be kwallet by default, but you can also use another one instead.
That’s a good recipe for screwing up your system and/or being pwned.
Don’t Do That!™
You better not let our female members read that. I’ve already seen posts being flagged for misogyny over here — and rightly so.
I started off with Mandrake. Along the line, I had an IRC network for a few years, together with a couple of other people. We ran anything from Debian, over Mandrake, over OpenSuSE, over Slackware, up to CentOS, and we even had a FreeBSD node.
On my own systems, I’ve run Mandrake, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Gentoo, and now for the last 5 years already, Manjaro. And as far as I’m concerned, Manjaro is the ideal distro for me.
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