• GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Linux is so cool, but boggles my mind. I just simply don’t have enough time to really get a good grasp on the terminal and commands associated with it. It took me 3 days worth of attempts from 8am when my fiance leaves for work to 5pm to finally get a pi-hole set up in tandem with a self hosted VPN with wireguard. I just got it up and working on Wednesday this week. I know there’s a tutorial on the pi-hole website, but with no Linux terminology experience it was tough to know what I was supposed to be typing into the terminal. Several times I was typing:

    sudo -i
    cd /etc/wireguard
    umask 077
    name="client_name"
    echo [interface] > "name"
    

    I thought the name= line would tell the terminal that I wanted to replace all the following lines that “name” appeared in with “client_name” automatically. Then I figured out that they were just telling me that I needed to replace “name” in their terminal commands with what I wanted to name the associated files I was creating lol. It was a real man…I’m a fucking moron moment.

      • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        That makes total sense. I never really considered that I have been learning Windows over the past 20 years. It was just learning “computer”. And I really appreciate the compliment to my dedication on it! I’m really happy with the result and I learned more about linux/networking/LePotato/Pi-hole than I would have guessed at the beginning of this whole project. From battling with Wireguard server configuration…ufw and portforwarding…client configuration…back to ufw…IP configuration…keys…etc. Troubleshooting was a maze sometimes 😂. One more thing before I go.

        About the name thing. Say I type:

        name="Gerald"
        wg genkey > ${name}.key
        

        Would my output then be a key generated by Wireguard and named “Gerald.key”? Or would it need to be:

        wg genkey > "${name}.key"
        

        Or like in your example:

        wg genkey > $name.key
        

        I think I’m mostly getting caught up in when the quotations are necessary and when they’re not.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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          1 year ago

          About the name thing. Say I type:

          name="Gerald"
          wg genkey > ${name}.key
          

          Would my output then be a key generated by Wireguard and named “Gerald.key”?

          Yes, assuming the user you’re logged in as has access to write files in the current directory. In /etc/wireguard, that’s usually only possible if you’re logged in as root (or using an interactive sudo shell). Adding sudo to your prompt doesn’t help in that case, because sudo only works up to the redirection character (>).

          HOWEVER: if $name is supposed to contain John Cena you’ll need to use wg genkey > "$name" or wg genkey > "${name}". Otherwise, your private key will appear in a file named John, and the key contents would be followed by the word Cena! Spaces mess up the shell and for that quotes are very very useful.

          I think I’m mostly getting caught up in when the quotations are necessary and when they’re not.

          The exact rules differ per shell. The default on Ubuntu is bash, the rules for which I’ll add below. macOS and some other distros use zsh as a default, which is mostly bash compatible but includes some “most people probably mean to type this other command” style fixes.

          In general:

          • Double quotes are used for when a variable can contain spaces (like a file name)
          • Single quotes don’t expand variables; '$name' contains the literal string $name, not Eve Johnson
          • Omitting quotes will lead to variables being expanded in place. If the contents of the variable are a single word, that effectively works the same as if you use double quotes

          Suppose you have a directory with these files:

          • file
          • file with spaces
          • readme.txt

          Suppose you want to remove some files with this script, using rm to delete them:

          myFile="file with spaces"
          
          # first quote option
          rm $myFile
          # second quote option  
          rm '$myFile'
          # third quote option
          rm "$myFile"
          

          The first rm call will try to remove the files file, with, and spaces. It will delete the file named file and give you two errors for the missing other two files. It’s as if you typed rm file with spaces. rm takes a long list of files that need to be deleted, so it’ll think you want to delete three files!

          The second rm call will give you an error, telling you that there is no file called $myFile. It’s as if you typed rm '$myFile'. You can create a file with that name, though; touch \$myFile or touch '$myFile' will create a file starting with a dollar sign. Many tools forget that this is a possibility (just like * and ? are perfectly valid file names!) and scripting based tools can easily fail or crash or even get exploited by hackers if you place a file with special characters on the system!

          The third rm call will remove the file file with spaces and leave the rest alone. It’s as if you typed rm "file with spaces". It’ll remove the one file.

          Using ${variable} is a bit safer and clearer, because you indicate exactly where the name of the variable starts and where it ends. Quotes and such are still necessary, following the conventions above. This is useful when you try to create a string like backup_$date_morning_$user.bak; are you referring to a variable $date_morning_ or to a variable called $date? backup_${date}_morning_${user}.bak makes things a lot clearer!

          For my own sanity and to make sure I know what to expect, I generally use double quotes and preferably ${} style expansion ("$name") for strings I want variables to be expanded in and single quotes around strings I definitely do not want variables to mess with.

          • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Wow! You absolutely know what you’re talking about! You did an amazing job clearing that up for me. I’ll save this comment in case I need to come back to it. Thank you!

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The first progress is always the slowest.

      It won’t always take you an entire day to get anything done in Linux. That’s just the pace you’re at as a beginner. As your knowledge expands you move faster.