Neofetch for displaying system information

Originally designed for use in demonstrations on Linux bash in an easy to understand way that could be used in screenshots and demos. In my experience I’ve found that it also makes it easier to review details of remotely administered and virtual machines or images when performing maintenance.

Neofetch shows Operating System, uptime, CPU, GPU, and memory information. While built for linux bash, it can also be installed on macOS and Windows machines.

Installation for Linux is as simple as:
sudo apt install neofetch

REFERENCES:

Clear Linux bash history

While having history available with the simple use of the up arrow is a convenience feature common to most linux builds it can come with some risk. One such risk is when you have inadvertently typed a password instead of a command, or had to pipe credentials into a command.

Thankfully, you can clear the entire history with a variety of methods, the most common are below but others are available in the references.


history -c && history -w


cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history && history -c && exit

REFERENCES:

Clear Ubuntu ‘bash’ history

After a lot of use, your history file can become full of a lot of old commands… once in a while, it can be useful (and safer) to clean them up.

NOTE: this can be especially important if you have ever used a password as a command line parameter as it is stored without encryption in a text file.

Preferred:

cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history && history -c && exit

Also useful:

history -c
history -w

REFERENCES:

Colored terminal window text on Ubuntu (Linux)

After a clean install, or simply access to a new machine, I often find it helpful to enable colored prompts in the terminal/command line environment.
For standard Ubuntu / Debian / Linux environments, this only requires you to remove a comment from a single line in a config file.

In /home/%USERID%/.bashrc you will find the following text, the last line simply needs to have the hash removed:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
#force_color_prompt=yes

Open vi/vim or your editor of choice and remove it and you are done!

NOTE: If you are using Nautilus, you will not see this file as it is hidden, choose “View”, “Show Hidden Files” (CTRL-H) and it should appear.