Java projects, especially when it comes to web or EJB applications, tend to get pretty complex. Setting up such a project is a non-trivial task because of the many conventions you have to follow to make your application deployable. The maven project management tool provides a mechanism to setup a …

When you work with the interactive shell, there's a common pattern that is used a lot: Copying or moving files to a directory and then changing to the target directory using cd. In these cases, you find yourself typing the name twice:

$ cp file1 file2 file3 /very/long/path/name …

Copying files from one host in your home network to another is easy using protocols like NFS or SMB. But if you just want to transfer a couple of files to a friend's computer in a foreign network, you have a lot of setup work to do (at least on …

Package management tools like apt-get make it very easy to install and remove software. The package manager takes care of downloading the package together with its dependencies if, of course, someone has taken the time to create a package and made it available to you. In some cases, you don't …

Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox have inherited a useful feature from the good old Netscape Navigator: Controlling a running browser instance via the command line. Using command line options, you can open URLs or files inside your browser window without having to enter them in the address bar.

Suppose you're working …

In the previous posting I gave an example on how to create an HTML report using Oracle's sqlplus tool. This time, we'll extend this example to demonstrate more of sqlplus' features.

Have a look at the following script:

--
-- Sample HTML report.
--
-- Usage: sqlplus LOGON @script OUTPUT_FILENAME
--

-- Activate HTML output and …

Oracle's sqlplus command line utility feels a bit antiquated for spoilt open source users. But with a bit of tweaking, you can generate nice database reports in HTML. Sure, the syntax is arcane, but if you're used to Perl you can get used to anything.

The following basic example prints …

The a2ps command line utility converts text files to PostScript which can then be sent to a printer. The resulting output contains all kinds of boxes and additional information which limits the space on the printed page to make your own notes.

Of course, this can all be turned off …

To control a D-Bus-enabled application, you need the interface definition to find out which methods are offered and which parameters they expect.

Of course, you can get the relevant interface definition from the application's source distribution. But there's an easier way: Ask the object in question via D-Bus to …

The Revision Control System (RCS) is one of the ancestors of modern versioning systems like Subversion. It lacks many of the features its successors provide, such as assigning tags to a set of files, but in some environments it is still very useful. RCS requires no server or central repository …