Collaborate Disseminate
If you want a quick view of a Linux system’s process load, you can use top or — slightly nicer — htop. But what if you want a quick snapshot of how the disk system is doing? There are a few tools you can use, some of which are …read more
You probably know about cron, a program that lets you schedule programs to run at various times. We’ve also talked about incron, which is very similar but instead of time, it reacts to changes in the file system. If you ever wanted to write a program that, say, …read more
awk is a kind of Swiss Army knife for text files. However, some of its limitations are often a bit annoying. I’ve used a simple set of functions to make awk a bit better, although I will warn you: it does require GNU extensions to awk. That is, you …read more
If you have more than one Linux computer, you probably use ssh all the time. It is a great tool, but I’ve always found one thing about it strange. Despite having file transfer capabilities in the form of scp and sftp, there is no way to move a file …read more
It is a problem as old as the Internet. You want to access your computer remotely, but it is behind a router that randomly gets different IP addresses. Or maybe it is your laptop and it winds up in different locations with, again, different IP addresses. There are many ways …read more
If you have SSH and a few other tools set up, it is pretty easy to log into another machine and run a few programs. This could be handy when you are using a machine that might not have a lot of memory or processing power and you have access …read more
If you use C or C++, you have probably learned how to open a file and read data from it. Usually, we read a character or a line at a time. At least, it seems that way. The reality is there are usually quite a number of buffers between you …read more
Shell scripting is handy and with a shell like bash it is very capable, too. However, shell scripting isn’t always very efficient. Think about it. If you run grep or tr or sort to do some operation in a shell script, you are spawning a whole new process. That takes …read more
We have to admit, we have an odd fascination with WSL — the Windows subsystem for Linux. On the one hand, it gives us more options on Windows 10 for running the software we love. On the other hand, we wonder why we aren’t just running Linux. Sometimes it is …read more
Continue reading Linux Fu: WSL Tricks Blur the Windows/Linux Line
A recent post about debugging constructs surprised me. There were quite a few comments about how you didn’t need a debugger, as long as you had printf. For that matter, we’ve all debugged systems where you had nothing but an LED to flash or otherwise turn on to communicate …read more