5mo ago

Why can't I create posts/comments on Lemmy with copy/paste from terminal to show what I did wrong?

So I tried to install a fan script last night. It's supposed to be a 1 line of code.

But even though it's a brand new installation of ubuntu, my system says "No. You need to install curl first"

When I try to do that, my system says "no, you already have a more recent version of curl installed"

I'd love to copy/paste the exact text, so you guys could see what I see, but when I do that, either in comments or in new posts, Lemmy gets confused, and won't post it.

How do I get you guys a copy/paste of this, so you guys can say "Oh, you have to do this this and this"?

Ok, this is becoming what I remember not liking of not understanding linux.

I was supposed to just type one line of code

... curl https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh | bash ...

And that led to me not having curl installed. After 24 hours of trying to figure this out, I finally figured out I need to type

... sudo snap install curl # version 8.1.2 ...

And so then I type

... curl https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh | bash ...

again, and this time I get this.

... % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 19245 100 19245 ************* 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 0 0 4848 Argon Setup
0 0 --:--************* :-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 48598 E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend. It is held by process 6408 (unattended-upgr) N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system. E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?

Please also connect device to the internet and restart installation.

bighat@bighat-desktop:~$ ...

I have no idea what that lock is, or what to do. I was told "oh, it'll be easy, you just gotta put in this one line of code". Going on 4 years trying to get that fan to work...

16 comments

Some terminals copy a formatted blob to your clipboard, so you may need to make sure it’s in plaintext before pasting. If you’re using a clipboard manager, look for a “paste without formatting” or similar function, or paste it into a plaintext file first and then re-copy that to make sure it loses the formatting.
- It's not that. I was doing things in terminal, and then on my cell phone typing each character manually.

The script is complaining that it can't find curl? What is this script that you are using? It's probably got a super-basic check for curl (in the wrong location) that can be modified. (Type in the source URL for it here, or something.)
However, running any script without fully understanding it is not advisable to begin with.
Typing in 'which curl' at the command line should give you the proper location of the existing binary of curl.
- Typed which curl, and it just went to the next line.
  The script location is https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh
  
  There are about a million different flavors of how to download and execute a shell script. Regardless, you need to redirect the output of curl into bash with the -s flag. Bash needs to know that it is reading from STDIN.
  Here is an over-thought stackoverflow page on it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5735666/execute-bash-script-from-url
  Also, if the script is not being read properly, that might explain the dpkg lock issue. Running two instances of dpkg simultaneously is likely causing that collision you are seeing. (If one instance is running, it will touch a lock file and then delete it when it stops. It prevents "bad things" from happening when two instances of the same app want the same resources.)
  That is odd if your path is broken. It curl should be in /usr/bin and 'which' should find it. Are you somehow launching another shell inside a shell? Like zsh inside of bash, or something in that flavor? (In some rare cases, that would break paths and profile configs for your active shell.)
  Regardless of why curl isn't being found, or only partially found, or something, learn "env". You need to get a decent picture of what your working environment is and why something as basic as curl "isn't found". ('which' is about as a baseline of a command as there is.)

Have you tried killing the other process using the dpkg lock?
- I don't know why, but a reboot fixed that problem, and I even got the script to install.....but it doesn't actually turn the fan on.

I've not had any trouble pasting text. Maybe there's a maximum length?
- It's not that. I've hand typed comments far longer than this pasted text. This is like 4-5 sentences worth of text, whereas I've hand typed mini novels here, essentially.
  
  Don't know what to tell you then, bud. Maybe ask your instance admin help community, or if you use a third party app go to them.
  You can format code with back ticks, by the way.
  def potato(yum)
  def potato(yum)

Could be a text length issue, or maybe there's some kind of weird character in there...?
Are you using

~~~ Some code More(code) ~~~
...to denote a code block?
- I updated my original post. It didn't make a code block, and it's different code than I was originally trying to type, but it at least let me type it.
  
  So those little marks are back tics. It's that mark commonly found at the top left alongside the tilde.

16 comments