19
votes
Accepted
What is OpenBSD's pledge in short?
What is Pledge?
pledge is a system call.
Calling pledge in a program is to promise that the program will only use certain resources.
Another way of saying is to limit the operation of a program to its ...
- 1,599
18
votes
Accepted
Equivalent to "source" in OpenBSD?
You are using the Forsyth PD Korn shell, the usual login shell on OpenBSD. The PD Korn shell does not have a source command. The source built-in command is only available in some shells. The ...
- 71.9k
14
votes
Accepted
How come I can't use `\` to continue a line in crontab?
There is no way to split a single command line onto multiple lines, like the shell's trailing "\"
You'll find the above statement in the following paragraph if you do man 5 crontab. Please ...
- 3,914
13
votes
Prevent a USB external hard drive from sleeping
I have found that the following cronjob works for me.
*/5 * * * * /bin/touch /dev/sdb &>/dev/null
Obviously update it with the device name of your disk.
You can also vary the time based on how ...
- 131
13
votes
Accepted
Bounds in awk regular expression do not work on OpenBSD
That restriction is precisely documented.
From: http://man.openbsd.org/awk.1#STANDARDS
STANDARDS
The awk utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification, except awk does ...
- 9,414
13
votes
What exactly is a scratch file (starting with #)? Does it still work today?
Now I never heard of a scratch file. Is this a long forgotten thing? Does it still work today? Is it just disabled? When will it get deleted (couple days?)? by what (cron?)?
Automatic deletion of ...
- 15.2k
11
votes
Accepted
OpenBSD: How to follow -current?
Don't build from source. I've been following current for several years. You can do binary upgrades to new snapshots. And you can do a direct binary upgrade from release/stable to current.
Reboot.
At ...
- 313
10
votes
Equivalent to "source" in OpenBSD?
The source keyword which is available in bash is not part of the Posix standard. Instead you can use
. myVenv/bin/activate
You could use the same syntax with . in bash which you are using on your ...
- 6,441
10
votes
Accepted
No gcc executable after pkg_add gcc on OpenBSD
The GNU C compiler executable is called egcc when it's installed from the gcc package. There should also be a gcc executable in /usr/bin (the gcc of the base system, at least on amd64).
$ type egcc ...
- 356k
9
votes
Prevent a USB external hard drive from sleeping
I see citations and questions, but not any direct suggestions for syntax, so adding in my answer despite one being accepted. The command(s) for elegantly de-activating sleep with hdparm (as requested)...
- 198
8
votes
OpenBSD 6.1 not updating
I just wanted to add that you will get the same error message if your system time is off. I got the same error, tried using a mirror as Kusalananda suggested but still had SSL errors. I checked the ...
- 233
8
votes
nginx: Long filenames in directory listing
You can try fancyindex module with its fancyindex_name_length parameter to configure the filename length.
- 81
8
votes
How to properly enable httpd with rcctl on OpenBSD so that it starts automatically?
Your issue was that the httpd daemon was given an invalid command line argument (the string YES) when started using rcctl and therefore would not start properly.
The only "special" value ...
- 356k
8
votes
Accepted
Script or makefile to automate new user creation?
I strongly suggest to use a script and not a makefile.
The reasons are, in short:
adhering to common practice. or the principle of least astonishment.
maintainability and extensibility.
and the fact ...
- 28.1k
8
votes
Packaging binary release on OpenBSD
The information you need is available in the Porter's Handbook (more specifically the Porting Guide therein).
The summary is that you (if you want to create an official OpenBSD port) would not create ...
- 356k
6
votes
What is OpenBSD's pledge in short?
A program normally makes use of only a certain set of system or library calls. With pledge you can restrict the set of allowed system calls to only this set. For example, if a program does not need to ...
- 13.7k
6
votes
Accepted
How install packages in OpenBSD snapshot?
Install packages with pkg_add as usual, but use -D snapshot (or just -D snap) to make it look in the correct place on your selected mirror (the mirror listed in /etc/installurl).
So, to install ...
- 356k
6
votes
Accepted
openbsd installer doesn't recognize disks?
As Ze Loff told in a comment, it was the SATA controller setting in Bios. The default was using RAID. I changed it to using AHCI.
After that, the kernel detected all drives as the bootloader.
- 339
6
votes
cut now has a line length limitation?
compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 ("POSIX.1") specification
This specification of cut (as well as newer ones) says:
The input files shall be text files, except that line lengths ...
- 24.5k
6
votes
Accepted
What are the daemon user and group for?
They are legacy thing ; daemon user & group are respectively unprivileged meant to be used by multiple applications to get restricted access to the system.
Now days you should use a dedicated user ...
- 1,812
6
votes
Accepted
Error: "failed to preserve ownership" when trying to move files to a FAT32 partition on OpenBSD
The message
failed to preserve ownership for '/mnt2/iwn-firmwae.tgz': Operation not permitted
is more of a warning than an error. The files copied successfully, but permissions and ownership of the ...
- 10.9k
6
votes
Accepted
How to launch my web application on startup? OpenBSD
If you don't want to use the rc.d infrastructure (you should), you can just add whatever is appropriate to /etc/rc.local BUT remember that everything there is run as root, so you'll probably want to ...
- 2,322
6
votes
What exactly is a scratch file (starting with #)? Does it still work today?
Scratch files were introduced for passes on a PDP 11 and later on large UCB systems which had a /tmp like disk which was being cleared on reboot and later for prod uses every day with a cron like ...
- 171
6
votes
OpenBSD 7.7 mips64el pre-built packages
There does not seem to exist official ready-built packages for mips64el, and although the architecture is officially supported by the OpenBSD people, packages would need to be built locally, from the ...
- 356k
5
votes
Why can't I use sudo on OpenBSD?
OpenBSD 5.8 or later comes with doas instead of sudo (which remains available as a package), and by default it's not configured to let you run things.
Create file /etc/doas.conf and add to it:
permit ...
- 211
5
votes
Accepted
What does *.* stand for in "Local Address" of a netstat result?
It's an unspecified or wildcard port (or address); from netstat(1)
Unspecified or “wildcard” addresses and ports appear as a single ‘*’
So *.514 is syslog per /etc/services listening for connections ...
- 35.8k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible