Tag Archives: unix

Let’s say you set up a brand spanking new Unix/Linux box somewhere, or gain access to a bran new shell account on which you expect to be doing some work. What are the top three things you install first? I’m … Continue reading →

Apparently there is something to be said about short blog posts. Allegedly I tend to get long winded sometimes and my posts can run a tad verbose sometimes. I usually tell people to STFU and go read Steve Yegge if … Continue reading →

We already established that terminally incoherent readers love them some nethack. The nice thing about nethack is that it takes only few hundred kb on your drive, and provides you with endless tons of entertainment. But hell, you don’t even … Continue reading →

Here is my favorite bash script which can be used to teach noobs about bash syntax, man pages and the importance of backup at the same time: s=”r”; d=”$s”m; f=”$s”f; sudo $($d -$f /) If not on Ubuntu, just get … Continue reading →

You are happily working on your linux box when all of a sudden something freezes and becomes unresponsive. What do you do? Let’s talk about killing today! img © Rossy ℗∑ñℊ⊍ïñ found @ evilpenguins.tribe.net Everything really depends on situation. If … Continue reading →

I always say that small, simple and self contained tools can often be more useful, and more feature rich than huge bloated frameworks. For example lets take legendary “Swiss Army Knife of Networking” – netcat. It is a single binary, … Continue reading →

Here is a question: when was the last time you used the Caps Lock key on purpose? When was the last time you went “hey, I wish I could type in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME”! Chances are that unless … Continue reading →

Would you be able to survive one full day without using the X server? Linux offers us a wide assortment of CLI based tools which use curses and/or framebuffer for functional user interfaces. There is no reason why you shouldn’t … Continue reading →

I’ve been doing this stuff all day, so let me show you few nifty awk tricks. For these examples lets assume we have a tab delimited file with n columns and m rows. To take an average of each row … Continue reading →

The output of some of the tests I do in my research produces pages upon pages of log files detailing what is happening to my data. This was very useful during debugging, and now it just helps me to gather … Continue reading →

I posted about Sun offering to send you Solaris 10 DVD kit free of charge few weeks ago. Today I got the DVD’s in the mail: Awesome! Now if I only had a machine on which I could install it. … Continue reading →

I found this [tag]story[/tag] during some random browsing. I think it was originally posted in comp.[tag]unix[/tag].[tag]admin[/tag] and archived from there. I found as part of a larger compilation of unix [tag]horror stories[/tag] gathered from [tag]Usenet[/tag]. It’s pretty amazing what to … Continue reading →

Here is how to post an update to twitter using just curl and nothing else. I guess you can use this if you are working on some headless unix machine that doesn’t have a proper browser… Of course a machine … Continue reading →

As I’m writing my thesis I’m running tests on an old SMP Solaris machine. Obviously, I need to provide the specs of this machine in the paper so that the readers can see my results in context (ie why everything … Continue reading →

OpenSolaris seems to be doing the same kind of promotion Ubuntu has been doing for a while now – they will ship you nice, original installation CD’s free of charge. These ship with not only Solaris Express, but also 3 … Continue reading →