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.
-
Interoperability in the Wikipedia ↩︎
-
Vim#DOS/Windows carriage returns setion in the ArchWiki ↩︎
-
Password manager in the Wikipedia ↩︎
-
libredefender at GitHub ↩︎