With traditional Unix sort(1), the size of the files you can sort is limited by the amount of available main memory. As soon as the file gets larger and your system has to swap, performance degrades significantly. Even GNU sort which uses temporary files to get around this limitation …

For a long time, Gnuplot has been my tool of choice for plotting diagrams. The diagrams it produces out of the box look very scientific, but it takes a lot of tweaking to produce something that's visually pleasing. I got used to Gnuplot's weird ways but I was never entirely …

Usually, I download all my email via fetchmail, sort it into folders using procmail and read the mails with mutt. This works reasonably well and I've been using this mail setup without major changes for about 10 years. Since I recently bought a netbook, I also wanted to read mails …

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 …

I read a lot of RSS feeds to keep myself up to date. Perhaps too many, almost two hundred articles appear in my Google Reader each day. One of the most busy ones is the DZone front page feed. Not all of it is interesting, so some filtering would be …

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 …

I've got a nice MP3 player from Samsung with 2 GB of flash memory. That's very little and I can never decide which files to keep and which to delete. Fortunately, the player also supports Ogg Vorbis files that require less space for the same quality. To make the most …

Writing long documents in a browser input box isn't the most pleasant thing to do. The WordPress builtin editor makes things even more inconvenient by forcing you to write your articles in HTML. It would be pretty cool if you could edit articles in a simple, readable format using your …