Utility
Next Entries »Intro to Vim Tip #1
Monday, July 10th, 2006Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode.
Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert [...]
recursing vimrc
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to [...]
Useful Utility: sed
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities.
First up, [...]
Useful Utility: whereis
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source [...]
Useful Utility: chown
Thursday, March 9th, 2006Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often.
chown [...]
Useful Utility: chmod
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux [...]
Useful Utility: ls
Monday, February 27th, 2006With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line.
ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will [...]
Useful Utility: screen
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but [...]
Useful Utility: wget
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner.
There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you [...]
Useful Utility: cut
Thursday, February 16th, 2006This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with.
First up is cut.
Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the [...]