Entries filed under category “Userland”:

Shell trick #1: Numbering lines in text files

Posted on 27 Sep at 01:13 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Hi, today I'll present you something new. It is an experiment and I'd be curios whether you like it. I've started a little series of ttyrecs. That means, I've recorded a little tip or trick on the console and uploaded it to PLAYterm so it can be easily played back in the browser. I thought it could be useful to do a little command line gymnastics.

Today I'll show you three ways how you can number lines in text files. We'll do that with cat, nl and vim.

Note: you need JavaScript enabled in order to play the ttyrec.

Grep's out of date? Full ACK!

Posted on 25 Sep at 06:53 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

grep is a handy tool and I use it every day. But sometimes I wish it had some more features. For instance full featured Perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE) since the current implementation is not complete and I think it will never be, automatic recursive search, exclusion of non-text files etc.

Here a tool called ack comes into play. It's a search tool and grep replacement written in Perl, which is able to do all these things. Guess what!

Damn Flash Player! Adobe, fix it!

Posted on 08 Jul at 06:00 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Adobe Flash has ever been a great source of anger due to many bugs (see here for example) and security vulnerabilities. Anyhow, it has evolved into a widely used technology and many, many websites need it to function correctly (yeah, HTML5 is coming, let's hope it will replace Flash in many places in the near future).

Adobe's bug fixing behavior has never been great and we all know, that Flash for Linux has been permanent beta (or alpha) since we can remember, but enough is enough. There is a severe bug that has now existed for three years, reported by hundreds of users. Adobe closed this report without taking action. Now it has been reported again and I want you to vote for it. Please!

Boot your Linux silently

Posted on 09 Sep at 07:51 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (10) | Trackback (1)

When you freshly set up a Linux distribution by hand, you get a lot of verbose output when booting into your system, but also install'n'go distributions like Ubuntu oder SUSE output some text when loading the kernel. This is not always desired and many people want to suppress these insistent system messages, but it's not as easy as you might think.

Configuring your console pager

Posted on 01 Sep at 06:14 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (3)

The UNIX philosophy is based on the DRY principle which declares: “Don't repeat yourself”. Therefore, a program just does what it's made for and uses libraries or even other programs on your system to do a more advanced job. Some of these auxiliary programs are user definable and probably you already know the EDITOR environment variable, which specifies your default editor for the console. This is used, e.g., for the command visudo, which opens your /etc/sudoers file safely, or by svn to input a commit comment. But another important component is your console pager, which is used to display textual content on the console.

Set up GTK application icons on KDE

Posted on 19 Aug at 10:00 PM by Janek Bevendorff | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Gnome and KDE come more and more together but there are still some differences which sometimes might lead to incompatibilities between these two large desktop environments. Whereas you have relatively few problems with KDE applications on Gnome there are far more problems when using Gnome applications on KDE even though there are some compatibility engines. In this Howto Blog post I'll show you a way to converge GTK and Qt as much as possible from the perspective of a KDE system.

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