Category Archives: Linux

/var/crash/ files

They are crash dumps of the kernel, i.e. files that contains useful information to recover the state of the kernel when it was crashing. These files are for your kernel what core dumps are for ordinary executables. There exists an utility that can be used to analyze those files : crash

You can delete files in under /var/crash if you’re willing to lose useful information needed to debug those crashes.

globbing

File globbing is a feature provided by the UNIX/Linux shell to represent multiple filenames by using special characters called wildcards with a single file name. A wildcard is essentially a symbol which may be used to substitute for one or more characters. Therefore, we can use wildcards for generating the appropriate combination of file names as per our requirement.

The bash shell provides three characters to use as wildcards:

  • Asterisk (*) to represent 0 or more characters
  • Question mark (?) to represent exactly one character
  • Square brackets ([]) to represent and match for the character enclosed within the square brackets.