 One of the universal truths of computers is that when you use it sometimes something is going to go wrong it's just kind of the way things work and that's even More true on Linux where people tend to tinker just a little bit more than they do on Windows or Mac You know we as nerds tend to get into our operating systems and you know Customize them and change things and script things and sometimes things just work And even if you're not looking at the operating system itself and you're looking at an application Sometimes things just break for no apparent reason You've made a change somewhere along the line and that change is not something that the program agrees with and it doesn't work You know either doesn't work properly or it doesn't work at all So the question is what do you do? What happens when things go wrong and you need to fix them now? I've talked about how to troubleshoot on Linux before and I've talked about the logs that Linux makes before because Linux logs Everything that it does and it puts them all in one directory The problem with that isn't that you know that is particularly hard going in and looking for those things It just can be really tedious because there are a ton of different logs So there's actually a better way to do it and this is the tip and trick I'm going to give you for today So let's just say for example, you're in DWM and you have a status bar up there And it looks really nice the problem is is nothing showing up So let's just show you that exact problem. So that's what's going on here now as you can see up here in the Bar, I have a whole bunch of stuff up here, but it all says not available like what the hell is going on and I have actually no clue what's going on because it should be working everything set up exactly the way it should be But it's not working. So what do I do? Well, I could go find the log somewhere because chances are the errors that are being spit out there are being put somewhere I could go spelunking into the logs directory and maybe find that or maybe it's in the Excession errors file. I don't know but there is an easier way like I said so let's go ahead and open up a terminal and The first thing you want to do when you discover a Problem that you're having with an application or a script or something is kill it If it's running in the background, you want to make sure it's dead So in my my situation, I'm going to use kill all SL status because that's the issue that I'm having up there in the bar And I enter and if I've done it right, it should go away. I mean, it's dead. Okay, we've killed it It is no longer running. It's fantastic now I could restart DWM and have it come back up In fact, I will show you exactly that and as you can see The problem came right back, right? That's just you know, that's that was one Option that I had this troubleshoot. Maybe it's just it didn't load so it by reloading DWM I was able to see if that fixed the problem, but it didn't so I'm going to kill SL status again now Here's the trick. So the best way to find out what's going wrong with any program. That's you know, causing you issues It's either to look for logs or run it in the terminal Every application that you can pretty much conceive of can be run from the terminal in some form or fashion Now, obviously, there are going to be some exceptions to this. They have to be executable and all that stuff, right? But for the most part if you're talking about an application or something like that You can run it from the terminal even if you don't think that it can be run from the terminal So for example firefox if you're having problems with firefox You can launch it from the terminal and what it will do is it will tell you every single thing that it's doing Including the things that it's doing wrong even if it doesn't run You know at all it will still spit something out So in this case what I'm going to do is just run SL status from the terminal and you're going to see It's up there again and hold behold. I have icons now And this is where I'm gonna have to kind of divert in my troubleshooting journey because I have actually no idea Why the icons are showing up when I run it from the terminal, but not when I run it just you know normally It doesn't make any sense to me. That's something that I'm gonna have to figure out later Now as you can see in the terminal here this is what really matters for the video is that it is spitting out errors and It's telling me exactly Some of the things that are going wrong with the script now It's not obviously all of them because I'm having some problems where the icons aren't showing up normally But they are now so that's really weird, but somewhere in my SL status config I have some paths there that it's looking for and those things don't exist yet That's just because I haven't gotten around to creating them So eventually I'll get those created and then the errors will go wrong. You'll go away So no matter what application you're using if you're having problems with it run it from the terminal because what it's going to do Is it's going to spit out something like this? It will probably even be more than this just in these four lines repeating over and over and over again but it will repeat the stuff that's going wrong somewhere in that gibberish that is that is putting out and 90% of your problem when you're troubleshooting is figuring out what the problem is once you know what the problem is It's very easily. It's very easy usually to go solve it. So Whenever you're having an issue Run the program from the terminal Now I know a lot of people are scared of the terminal and this looks like gibberish to a lot of people But this is actually a fairly simple problem at least for those missing directories But no matter what the problem is as long as you know what it is you can probably go Google what the solution is and That's why 90% of the problem or 90% of the journey. I should say is knowing what the problem is so That's the tip and trick. There's really not much more to it And this is one of those things where you'd expect to see this tip online in more places because this is obviously something that's been around for a very very long time and If you are a longtime Linux user, you probably know exactly this trick But some people who have either just switched to Linux or maybe you don't have problems a lot off and maybe you didn't know this So hopefully it helped you if you have comments on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on master's honor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon patreon.com slash linux cast links for liberator pay and YouTube will be in the video description as well Thanks, everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you The channels will not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time