Everybody knows that Unix shell utilities are powerful. Even though they're text-based, you can build a lot of useful things outside of the text domain. Today I'll show you how to implement set operations. All we need are sorted files as input, with each file representing a set.

Let's create …

Upgrading from Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" to "Intrepid Ibex" wasn't the smooth ride I was used to. I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since "Breezy Badger" without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with …

The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around the basic concepts without much trouble.

You've probably seen …

A while ago, I blogged about my self-made backup solution, a simple shell script using rsync to create snapshot backups. This wasn't my first attempt at establishing backups for my private workstation but the most successful one so far. The backup takes less than 5 minutes for about 10 GB …

One could assume that I have run out of material and retreat to safer ground, but far from it. From now on I'll just throw in a few quick shell hacks hoping some of you don't know them yet. So, here it goes ...

Unix pipes are cool, but it's quite …

Virtually everybody agrees that backups are a good idea, but few people actually do them. Backup software is often time consuming to set up or just overkill for a single-user system. In this article I'll show how easy it is to build your own backup solution on Linux using rsync …

Recently, I decided to re-partition my hard disk because I needed a larger swap partition. In this article, I'll describe the process of backing up an existing system and restore it somewhere else. I haven't done anything like it in years, so I was up to some smaller surprises that …

A lot of people use SSH to log into remote hosts. SSH is secure and works well, but if you have to access many hosts with long, well-chosen passwords there is a lot of typing to do just for authentication.

In this article I'll walk you through a basic public …

When I wanted to suspend my notebook today the hibernate button was gone from the menu. Running the /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh shell script as root still worked, but there was no way to get that silly button back.

My first idea was some kind of configuration trouble, suddenly appearing …

I've been a happy user of RCS for years (in fact, my software engineering course at university was held by Walter Tichy, the original author of RCS). The good old Revision Control System may be a dinosaur, but it served me well for my configuration files and scripts.

Over the …