Here are some tips for working in the shell that I use on a daily basis. These may be known to most veterans, please contribute your favorite shortcuts to the comments. But for the most part this is not for the uber leet Linux geek, this is for those new to the terminal.

TAB
- Gives you suggestions / completes stuff for you. Type a, Press it twice, it will make your life a lot easier.

ctrl+w
- Remove word behind cursor.

ctrl+u
- Undo / Erase everything from cursor to beginning of the line

!!
- Type out whatever you typed out last, can be combined with tools like sudo

alt+f
- Go forward to the end of the previous word

alt+b
- Move cursor back to the beginning of the previous word

ctrl+d
- You’re done? Press ctrl+d to logout. If you’re in a virtual terminal, it may also close the window.

ctrl+z
- Stop the current process. Say you run gvim, and then you want to spawn another process. Press ctrl+z, then type bg. Once you’re done with the “other” process, you may type fg to bring it back into the foreground.
Comments (9)
Yum Messed Up
Filed under: General Linux, Linux Software — TheLinuxBlog.com at 10:05 am on Monday, November 16, 2009

So, this morning, when I got to work and booted up, I noticed something was wrong. My machine was not running as usual. It turns out, packagekit was sitting there being a general pain. I just wanted to look busy, so I killed the process. Turns out that wasn’t such a good idea, since it didn’t finish doing whatever it was doing and caused an ugly error like this:

rpmdb: Thread/process 28373/3077981888 failed: Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db4 error(-30975) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 – (-30975)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:

Error: rpmdb open failed

rpmdb: Thread/process 28373/3077981888 failed: Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db4 error(-30975) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 – (-30975)

Naturally, I tried using rpm, do try and fix things, since it indicated something to do with a database I tried:

[owen@linuxblog ~]$ sudo rpm –justdb
rpm: –justdb may only be specified during package installation and erasure
[owen@linuxblog ~]$ sudo rpm –rebuilddb
rpmdb: Thread/process 28373/3077981888 failed: Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db4 error(-30975) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 – (-30975)

Well, it turns out that those options don’t work, and the rebuilddb gave an error about the db4 being corrupt. Well, I decided to go into /var/lib/rpm as the other error had that directory and found the db4 files. Running db45_recover sounded like it might work, so I gave it a shot.

[owen@linuxblog rpm]$ db45_recover -h /var/lib/rpm/
db45_recover: unlink: /var/lib/rpm/__db.003: Permission denied
db45_recover: unlink: /var/lib/rpm/__db.004: Permission denied
db45_recover: unlink: /var/lib/rpm/__db.000: Permission denied
db45_recover: unlink: /var/lib/rpm/__db.002: Permission denied
db45_recover: unlink: /var/lib/rpm/__db.001: Permission denied
db45_recover: /var/lib/rpm/log.0000000001: log file unreadable: Permission denied
db45_recover: PANIC: Permission denied
db45_recover: DB_ENV->log_newfh: 1: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
db45_recover: dbenv->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery

That’s right,you need to be root for this bad boy:

[owen@linuxblog rpm]$ sudo db45_recover -h /var/lib/rpm/

The above seemed to fix it for now. I guess next time I’ll think about it more before I start slaying processes on a Monday morning.