Home HOW-TOs
I've written about bash quoting before, and yes, it's about as exciting
as watching paint dry or listening to the corn grow.
It can also be extremely frustrating when it doesn't do what you want,
case in point: trying to script the updating of a field in a mysql table
when the field to be changed contains quote characters.
Submitted by
Mitch Frazier on Thu, 2009-11-19 11:52.
It's fairly simple to find large files on your system using
commands such as find, but if you're looking for directories
over a certain size find won't help you.
The Perl script presented here can help you track down
those explosively large directories.
Submitted by
Da A Feng on Tue, 2009-11-17 10:16.
As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they
don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it.
When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice
(and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still
waiting for them to upper case the "a").
YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single
package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with
all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats.
And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE:
yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.
Submitted by
Mitch Frazier on Thu, 2009-11-05 09:05.
In the last release of Ubuntu (9.04) the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key sequence
normally used to kill the X server was disabled by default.
Apparently many people like to kill their X server this way
so a workaround "dontzap" package was used to enable it.
With the latest Ubuntu release (9.10, aka Karmic) it's even simpler
to enable it.
Submitted by Mallik Arjun on Tue, 2009-11-03 10:58.
Sometimes when you're watching online videos on youtube or other sites,
you want to save some of them for later offline playback.
You've probably heard of Firefox extensions like DownloadHeloper
that can do this, but sometimes you may only have a bare version
of Firefox, or perhaps a different browser, one that doesn't have
a plugin for doing this.
Using the tip below, you can save videos no matter what browser you're using.
Submitted by Cheng Renquan on Wed, 2009-10-28 08:00.
I usually lock my screen when I leave my cubicle for a tea-break etc.
With all the talk of saving energy these days I've
disabled screen-savers on my system.
Still, when I'd lock my screen I noticed that the LCD didn't turn off
completely.
Wanting to go as green as I could I wanted to switch off the LCD as well.
Submitted by Sangeeth Keeriyadath on Tue, 2009-10-20 11:33.
In Part I we tested out Android on VirtualBox. Now
we'll try running Palm's WebOS as a Virtual Appliance.
This article assumes that you are using: Submitted by Ross Larson on Wed, 2009-10-14 09:14.
If you don't want to step up to a full monitoring solution
such as Nagios you can create your own scripts for monitoring
the things that you want to monitor, such as disk space.
The following script alerts you when your root partition is
almost full:
Submitted by Mallik Arjun on Tue, 2009-10-13 12:23.
With Google and Verizon recently announcing that several Android phones
will be coming out on their network, a Linux lover might have
smartphones on the brain. Obviously, having Linux running on your
phone is awesome, but which Linux OS should you choose?
Android? WebOS? Maybe even Ross Larson on Mon, 2009-10-12 15:11.
Now that summer is over and your digital camera is full of pictures,
how do you get them organized?
At the command line of course!
The script provided here automatically organizes them into
sub-directories by date.
Submitted by Zsolt Hajdu on Wed, 2009-10-07 09:18.
Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common,
but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions.
This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called.
This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another
way to express existing features.
Submitted by Mitch Frazier on Tue, 2009-10-06 11:22.
In diff tool speak, a visual diff tool is a GUI application.
Meld is such a tool: a tool for
displaying differences between files (and directories) and also for
merging the differences.
Meld is programmed in Python.
Submitted by Lucas Vieites on Mon, 2009-10-05 13:20.
Like other word processes, OpenOffice.org Writer makes creating tables of contents (ToCs) quick and easy. Unfortunately, it also works with unaesthetic defaults and allows you to make choices that complicate your work flow rather than improving it.
Fortunately, Writer is also flexible enough to allow you to produce useful, aesthetic ToCs if you follow a few basic steps.
Submitted by Bruce Byfield on Thu, 2009-10-01 10:20.
If you saw yesterday's Tech Tip and were looking for more
on using TCP/IP with bash's built-in /dev/tcp device file then read on.
Here, we'll both read from, and write to a socket.
Submitted by Mitch Frazier on Wed, 2009-09-30 11:56.
Most of us default to wget, curl, netcat and
others when in need of network data from the commandline,
not knowing, or perhaps forgetting, that bash often provides
the support that we need using redirection from
/dev/proto/host/port.
Submitted by Federico Lucifredi on Tue, 2009-09-29 12:23.