Utilities and miscellaneous

File renaming

Working with files containing special characters is cumbersome (especially in the terminal) and the FAT filesystem, for example, does not allow them. The detox utility removes umlauts¹, spaces and special characters, such as ?, and replaces them with an underscore (_) (or in case of & with an _and_). I install the detox package:

sudo pacman -S detox

And to rename files with it I navigate to the directory of interest and run:

detox -rv

Interoperability

For some interoperability² during advanced tasks such as labeling partitions of Windows filesystems (FAT, exFAT and NTFS³) or dealing with control letters (DOS or Windows carriage returns⁴), I install the following packages:

sudo pacman -S dos2unix dosfstools exfatprogs ntfs-3g

Consider to install e2fsprogs for ext4 partition tasks if this is not installed by dependencies, already.

Password manager

I use a local password manager⁵ to generate random secrets and store secret information for convenience and security. My favorite application is the cross- plattform application KeepassXC. It uses encrypted password database files and can be installed with the command:

sudo pacman -S keepassxc

For browser integration, (see #Web browser section of the Multimedia and web guide) you need to install the add-on KeepassXC-Browser. Click the Add-ons and themes option in LibreWolf’s menu, or open a new tab and navigating to the page about:addons, or the use the <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<a> keystroke.

In KeepassXC go to Tools > Settings > Browser Integration > Advanced > Config Location: and add ~/.librewolf/native-messaging-hosts to finish the integration setup.

Scientific calculator

SpeedCrunch is feature-rich a scientific calculator with a keyboard-driven interface documented in the page First Steps. I install the speedcrunch package as follows:

sudo pacman -S speedcrunch

Antivirus

Imagine the information security compliance guideline says you need an antivirus but you run Arch Linux. — libredefender⁶

As the primary reason I’d use an antivirus scan is to prevent that I unintentionally spread such malware⁷ when sharing files with users of Windows⁸ systems, for example. For this reason, I install the libredefender package to run a malware scan on demand:

yay libredefender

To instantly update the malware definitions, I execute:

sudo freshclam

Afterwards I can scan a directory such as ~/Downloads by running:

libredefender scan ~/Downloads

In order to prevent libredefender to automatically scan my system on a regular base I create ~/.config/libredefender.toml containing:

[scan]
## by default libredefender spawns one thread per cpu core
## set to 1 to use a single thread
concurrency = 1

excludes = [
    # may contain virus files for studies
    "/home/thisven/Downloads/win-malware-to-play-with/*",
]

skip_hidden = true
skip_larger_than = "30MiB"

[schedule]
## manually scan for infections
automatic_scans = "off"
#preferred_hours = "09:00:00-17:00:00"
## Do not run scans when on battery
skip_on_battery = true

To verfify this new confoguration I can use the command:

libredefender dump-config

Proceed with installing and configuring Office tools in just another guide or go back to the overview and follow instructions for specific use cases.