numbersix

don't have ls but you do have echo? try :

$ echo *

not entirely sure why that works though...

Update - Simple really, the shell expands the asterisk to everything in the current directory, and each one is passed to echo, with the result that you get a listing of all the files.

nice explanation of regex backreferences, mentioned a few blog entries ago - here

du sorted on size (largest first):

$ du -k | sort -nr | more

very interesting paper written by Dennis Richie on the beginnings of UNIX (and C).

changed from mutt to pine as i couldn't find a good way of filtering incoming mail without faffing with procmail (can't the client do that?). also, mutt seems to behave a little weirdly against the IMAP server, messages marked for deletion keep re-appearing, sync problems etc. pine is also a little less fiddly to configure.

note to self, new XFREE86 config tool is xf86cfg.

note to self, new XFREE86 config tool is xf86cfg.

ahah! % toggles between parentheses in vi.

egrep '(expr1|expr2)' file to find occurances of expr1 OR expr2

FreeBSD - lsof - list all open files - neat :)

updating ports collection :
cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup2.de.freebsd.org
portversion
portupgrade {port}

neat gzip tip - cat blah | gzip > foo.gz

to stop xwindows blanking the screen - xset s off

when using tip on a serial connection to a solaris machine, ~# sends the equivalent of a STOP-A

writing bourne shell scripts, want to check for existance of command line params. try [ -z $1 ] which should tell me if the first command line param is empty. however all i get is "test: argument expected" when the param is not there. no good. annoying. discover bourne shell has a reserved var for the number of arguments passed, looking much like perl's - $#. so accomplish it by a simple [ $# -ne 1]. simple when you know how.

switched to the mozilla email client after i'd finally had enough of pine. pretty impressed so far, i like the quick and simple filter dialog, the screen format etc. nice :)

regex - match something n times {n}, match something at least n times {n,}, match something between n and m times {n,m}, eg find all words in dict 6 chars or longer - egrep '^.{6,}$' dict . bet it doesn't work in solaris though... pooey solaris.

new regex discovery - backreferences, v nice. eg:
sed -E 's/([0-9]+):([0-9]+$)/1,2/' - match numbers colon numbers and replace the colon with a comma. the parentheses (brackets) remember and can then be used again with 1 2 etc

new regex discovery - backreferences, v nice. eg:
sed -E 's/([0-9]+):([0-9]+$)/1,2/' - match numbers colon numbers and replace the colon with a comma. the parentheses (brackets) remember and can then be used again with 1 2 etc

i hate spam

to switch to console after starting xwindows - CTRL-ALT-F2. to get back to xwindows - CTRL-ATL-F9

to set date on solaris eg 040218122002

why do i almost always do an ls immediately after cding into a newly made directory? i've seen other people do this too, so it's not just me. what the hell am i expecting to find there?

why do i almost always do an ls immediately after cding into a newly made directory? i've seen other people do this too, so it's not just me. what the hell am i expecting to find there?

Scientists were excited this week at having isolated a brief sound which occurred immediately before the Big Bang. Apparently, the sound was, 'uh oh'.

'Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.' -- Henry Spencer

'For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3.'

i didn't know you could do that - mv ${DIR1}/[qxs]${file} ${DIR2}/

24/7/365? no! 24/7/52!

Progress means simplifying, not complicating - Bruno Munari

to change case on the unix command line - tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' (or the other way about)

ping can return error codes, useful for scripting, as in:
#Solaris:
$ ping (ip)
#FreeBSD:
$ ping -c (ip)
$ echo $?

ok, so for whatever reason (firewall) you can telnet to a unix box but not ftp. however you need some files from it. they are reasonably large, and contain binary information. how do you get them?

client $ script
client $ telnet (host)
..login..
host $ uuencode (filename) (filename)
host $ CTRL-D
client $ CTRL-D

you should now have the result of the session in a file (probably called typescript). all you need to do is strip the ^Ms out of it, and uudecode it. hey presto. neat :)

learning awk. neat :) produce an average idle time from captured output of a solaris vmstat:
grep -v swap vmstat.txt | grep -v memory | awk '{s += $22} END { print 'sum-',s,' avg-',s/NR}'

'The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don't like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for.'
A. Tanenbaum, 'Introduction to Computer Networks'

found this picture linked to on slashdot, with the caption 'Run Linus Run, no really RUN!' doesn't it just sum up everything that is un-fashionable about computers? And what is the guy in the back doing?

to disable NIS (ypbind) from starting on a Solaris machine, just rename -

/usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart

to something else.

is programming art? i think so. Justin Erenkrantz also thinks so. thanks to Ben for the link.

now there's something i've been wondering about for a while, how to change case with reg expressions, eg in vi :

:%s /./l&/g

will change all characters to lower case, and :

:%s /./u&/g

will change them all to upper

the mail application on my ibook recently stopped working. i think it was a combination of moving it from the applications folder to a sub folder, and then upgrading it when i upgraded to OSX 10.2.1. when i tried to run it, the app just bounced a few times in the dock and then vanished. the console showed error messages reguarding a missing nib file. anyhoo, after a bit of poking around i discovered Pacifist, a util based around the unix pax util, something i'd been looking at recently for something else. using this i opened the essential packages package from my OSX install CD, and was able then to re-install the mail app.
and it works. i am now of course in the position of having most of 10.2.1 installed, but the mail app from 10.2.0. it seems to work ok though, so it's not something i'm particularly bothered about.

reading an article on /. about 3D packages, I remembered a package called Povray i used to mess about with years ago. it really has come a long way since then, stuff like this is stunning.

trying to rm that file with a '-' at the start of its name? :

rm -- -foo

where -foo is the filename. apparently -- tells rm not to treat the rest of the arguments as parameters. i'm also told that this works for other common UNIX commands, cp etc.

read headline on the BBC news site this morning - Millions wonder at southern eclipse. my first thought was '14 year old science student explains all.'

making progress on a mySQL backend for this site. my first forrays into the world of mySQL a few years back never amounted to much, more for a lack of project than anything else. now i have something to use it with it all starts making sense. i already feel comfortable with the basics. also managed to install it on the iBook without too much hassle.

useful shell scripting trick:

$ set -- `uname -a`

then variables $1 through $n are set to the fields of the back ticked command, in this case:

$ echo $1
SunOS
$ echo $2
booger
$ echo $3
5.7

etc. neat. saves having to parse out the fields, or use awk or something.

changed my FreeBSD email client to Sylpheed from Mozilla's built in client. Although I like Mozilla's, there are a number of things that still irk me, the main one being that it is part of Mozilla when Mozilla should be a browser and nothing else. First impressions are good, it has the (now standard) Outlook layout, seems to do IMAP reasonably well against the company's expunge server, though I've yet to figure out how to fill my address book with minimum hassle. I'm hoping it does somthing similar to Mozilla by catching all the email addresses that go past, which I always thought such a great feature. Once I'm happy with Sylpheed I will have a go at Phoenix as a lighter replacement for Mozilla. Already converted to Chimera on the iBook which is much faster and lighter.

good article in the Boston Globe on Stanislav Lem, the author of Solaris.

sorry Sylpheed but Mozilla's email client is back on the desktop. just a bit too klunky for my tastes, and the filtering didn't seem to work particularly well.

maybe i should just try movable type instead of trying to find time to attach the database to the back of this blog...

very nice shell scripting trick:

df -k -F ufs -l | while read FILESYSTEM KBYTES USED AVAIL CAPACITY MOUNTED_ON
do
echo $FILESYSTEM
done

The Independent has a chilling report on John Simpson's almost fatal friendly fire experience. I find it very difficult to understand how so much money is ploughed in to building these weapons and yet such a high percentage of situations like this still happen. The US made a lot of noise about how much more advanced their technology is since '91. Really? I'm wondering what criteria they are using to make such a statement.

Nina Simone died over the weekend. BBC report..

Again an idea that comes to me in a blinding flash of genius, and someone has beaten me to it. Not that surprising this time though - a library of useful regular expressions. Not quite how I would have done it, but useful none the less.

Interesting interview over at OS News with the FreeBSD core team and one of the lead programmers. good to see a long interview for once, instead of those single page things. ta to /. for the link.

one day i will know the crontab entry time fields off by heart without having to look them up in "Essential System Administration"

base conversion on the command line:

$ echo "ibase=10;obase=16;15" | bc
F

where in this case we want to know what base 10 15 is in base 16

Took a taxi back from Tim O'Reilly's talk last night, amazed to find a TV built into the cab. After the novelty wore off, and the 5 minute long advert had finished I started getting a little annoyed with it. I was able to turn off the sound but not the picture, which is almost impossible not to watch. I hope this is not going to become the norm, spoiling what is normally a relaxing indulgence.

http://www.cabvision.com/

Reading this interesting article about HTTP proxies, discovered Middleman, a small HTTP proxy. Apart from doing an excellent job of filtering out ads it does all sorts of fun stuff like show you HTTP headers, log HTTP traffic, and allow wonderful URL tricks. Also very configurable. It even fixes a weird probelm I've been seeing with Mozilla and IIS web sites, AND (and this is really cool) it properly makes links out of URLs that aren't. Everyone should have one.

Thinking about a new plan of attack for the spam wars - education. Educate the masses to stop replying to the bloody stuff, and eventually it really would become unfeasable to run a spam business. Infact you could take this a few steps further, instead of making it illegal to send spam, why not make it illegal to reply to spam? Make a big song and dance about it in the media, scare the average Joe Schmo who is replying to the stuff in the first place, and you reach the same result - spam businesses will find it no longer makes any money.

"This webpage contains information about Red Hand Gang as part of the Kids TV In The 70s section." It does? Oh yes, shoved into a tiny column in the corner after the ad which takes up most of the page, yes I can see it.

hacky-but-works bit of shell to grab the last 10 search terms people have entered at MetaCrawler:

lynx -dump http://www.metaspy.com/spymagic/Spy | grep "   \[[0-9]" \

 | grep -v "Powered by InfoSpace" \

| grep -v "\[3\]MetaCrawler" | sed 's/   \[[0-9]*\]/           /g'

A problem I've been faced with recently, and I know a fairly common question in the UNIX community : how to search and replace a given string in a number of files quickly and efficiently. Here is the answer I came up with walking home today. I was quite chuffed that it worked first time. This works in bash :

for file in *.txt
do
ed ${file} <<!
%s/foo/bar/g
wq
!
done

where *.txt selects the files, 'foo' the string to search for and 'bar' the replacement string. ex can be used instead of ed, but you need to add a colon before the %, ala vi.

I'd be interested in any other solutions to the problem.

The Sun newspaper today launches a fund 'to help people with mental health problems like boxing hero Frank Bruno.' Strange turnaround from their stance yesterday when an early edition of the paper reported 'Bonkers Bruno Locked Up'.

Read about it but never had the need for it until today. Cygwin does exactly what it says on the tin, ie "a Linux-like environment for Windows". I was most impressed with the X support, works wonderfully. My thankfully brief forrays into the world of Windows will now be slightly less troublesome.

Me to hardware shop employee - "Do you have anything that will get rid of moths?"
Him, after much sucking of teeth - "Mmmmmmmm, no I don't think we do, but this Anti-Moth might help"

WTF?

This looks very nice indeed. Can't wait to try it out. Needs to be ported to FreeBSD/OSX really.

This looks very nice indeed. Can't wait to try it out. Needs to be ported to FreeBSD/OSX really.

You know you've been doing too much UNIX when you see the word 'goatherd' and immediately think of it as a daemon for some goather service.

I found out what ${parameter:-word} means in shell. Cool. See the sh man page.

Stumbled across dotfiles.com again today. Vastly useful site, particularly when trying to remember what the option is to get vim highlighting syntax. ( syn on ).

Very useful list of devices allocated under Linux - http://www.lanana.org/docs/device-list/devices.txt

This works nicely when a 'for' loop would split lines into fields :

cat /etc/passwd | while read line
do
echo $line
echo ------
done

Once again someone has already beaten me to a cool idea. This time it's the UNIX equivalent chart at www.unixguide.net.

Interesting article in the Guardian about "Sir Alfred", or Merhan Karimi Nasseri, his real name. He has been living on a bench in terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport since 1988. Steven Spielberg's The Terminal is loosley based on him.

I did it! I have Gentoo booting! It was a long and sometimes confusing journey, but the login prompt is flashing at me as I type. One thing I had to do is change the Grub boot line to include :

gentoo=nodevfs udev

after I got problems errors with it not being able to find devfs. I'm using udev instead.

I did it! I have Gentoo booting! It was a long and sometimes confusing journey, but the login prompt is flashing at me as I type. One thing I had to do is change the Grub boot line to include :

gentoo=nodevfs udev

after I got problems errors with it not being able to find devfs. I'm using udev instead.

Weird problem. Getting this message after installing ftpd under Gentoo and trying to ftp in for the first time :

Error loading /etc/ssl/certs/ftpd.pem

For some reason there are SSL certificates involved? I fixed this by taking the script:

cert-dummy.sh

from the source tarball of bsdftpd-ssl. Run it, then copy the resulting file cert-dummy.pem to ftpd.pem and plonk it in the appropriate place. Seems to do the trick.

Took me a while to figure out how to do this. this page helped http://forums.teamphoenixrising.net/showthread.php?t=32325

x2vnc is a very neat little tool that gives you dual screen between two computers running different operating systems. So for instance I have a Gentoo machine as my main box at work, with the obligatory Windows machine next to it with it's own monitor. Running x2vnc on my Gentoo box I can just move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen and hey presto it apears on the windows desktop. And the best thing is that the clipboard works between the two machines, so no more pasting stuff into temporary text files etc. Very nice. Give it a go, it's a bit spooky at first :)

Make Firefox give you a page of HTML instead of that annoying dialog box when you type an invalid URL - in about:config, change this :

browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true

Nice.

I don't understand why this option isn't made the default for Firefox. There's nothing I hate more than links which insist on opening new windows. Bloody arogant if you ask me. Actually the feature should never have been allowed in the first place. It's my decision to open a new window or tab, not the site designer's. Rant, rant.

Thanks to misterzeta for pointing me in the direction of Meebo, very nice web front end to Gtalk, Yahoo chat, ICQ and MSN Chat. Useful if you don't have a client handy, or are stuck behind a firewall.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/postgresql/

Driftnet is a little toy that sniffs images from network traffic and displays them on the screen. Neat idea I came across a while back, but until recently I've always been on switched networks so it doesn't make much sense. There is even a FreeBSD port for it. Would make a nice screen saver. Now to try it out :)

http://www.pimpmysnack.com/ - We take Snacks to their limit, and show what they're capable of with a little ingenuity, a little cash, and a lot of imagination. Madness in the kitchen. - Thanks to Nick for the url.

I've been looking for a way of multiplexing several ssh sessions. By that I mean the ability to type once, and the result happens in x ssh sessions. Thanks to someone on the FreeBSD UK user list I came across cssh (http://freshmeat.net/projects/cssh/). This does pretty much what I need, and so far I've had no problems with it.

What would be ideal though is functionality built into the window manager to do the same thing, so I 'tag' any number of windows, even varying applications, and my keyboard input, (maybe even mouse) is copied to all windows. For instance I could be typing into 3 ssh sessions and an instance of vi to record my typing.

If you get the following while trying to run up2date:

RPM error.  The message was:
Could not determine what version of Red Hat Linux you are running.
If you get this error, try running 

                rpm --rebuilddb

You may want to check to see if the redhat-release RPM is installed. Installing this fixed the problem for me.

For some reason it seems very difficult to get Samba mounts to work from FreeBSD's fstab. I think I've got the (a?) magic formula:

<fstab>
//bob@sambaserver/share        /the/local/mount/point  smbfs   rw,noauto,-I=10.11.12.13      0 0
</fstab>

where:

bob = username
sambaserver = netbios server name
share = share name
10.11.12.13 = IP address of sambaserver

and

<.nsmbrc>
[SAMBASERVER:BOB]
password=bobspassword
</.nsmbrc>

Put .nsmbrc in root's home directory and make sure it isn't readable by anyone else. The bit in square brakets needs to be in capitals.

I've written up a page on installing OpenBSD onto an AR-B9637 here.

It seems that the recent update to OSX (10.4.7) broke Canon's Camera Window software. While there doesn't seem to be an official fix for this at the moment I've found a work around which is almost as good. Plug the CF card into a normal USB card reader, the Camera Window software seems to recognise it as if you had plugged in your camera. After all the camera is probably only acting as a USB storage device anyway.

Hopefully Canon will fix this soon, I don't think it's a problem with OSX as such.

Quite often I don't want deleted mail to go to my Trash bin first, especially if it is spam or if I'm having mailbox quota problems. Holding down SHIFT before pressing delete will bypass the trash folder and delete mail immediately.

Converting films from my Samsung SGH-P300 to 'normal' mpeg (probably mpeg 2?):

ffmpeg -an -i foo.mp4 -r 25 bah.mpg

Haven't found a way of getting the sound across, hence the -an. orlando at numbersix.net if you have a solution.

Every so often you come across a piece of software that just seems right straight away. I've been using Gaim for my ICQing, and never been really happy with it. It seems to be too sensitive to network issues, popping up the reconnect dialog way too often. And generally it seems lacking in some way. So I was very please to discover Centericq recently, a text based chat client that supports all the usual protocols. Installed the FreeBSD port and had it configured and running in less than a minute. Very clean, unfussy layout.

A couple of things I need to either get used to or figure ways around though, I'm used to pressing return to send the message, Centericq uses ^X which isn't that intuitive. And being text based it isn't obvious that someone has called you when you're running it in a window on an other desktop, or hidden behind what you're doing. Maybe I can get it to beep?

Running it on my FreeBSD server it complements Pine very well as a text based tool. Maybe I'll even be converted to lynx soon.

I tried to ssh into my server the other day from behind a very restrictive firewall to read my mail. I found that it wouldn't allow outgoing connections to the standard ssh port (22).

Back at home later I started thinking about installing a web mail program on the server to get around such situations, but eventually solved the problem by doing something much simpler, I configured ssh to listen to more than one port, the second port is a much more commonly allowed port like 80 or 443.

You can do this by configuring multiple Port directives in sshd_config. Don't forget to HUP the ssh daemon once you've done this for the changes to take effect.

vim highlights matching brackets which is nice until it starts becoming a pain. This in your .vimrc will turn it off:

let g:loaded_matchparen= 1

From here : http://groups.google.com/group/comp.editors/browse_thread/thread/42daad5f97aa6f13/9e140069098c7560?lnk=raot

You can still bounce between the matching brackets by pressing %.

Sun machine, trying to connect to the RSC and you're getting the message "Console session already in use". You know the other connection is not important.

Some versions of RSC allow:

console -f

to force a connection. If this doesn't work, try:

resetrsc

I always forget this and spend ages finding out how to do it. How to test for an argument passed from the command line to a shell script, and not get "argument expected" error:

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo argument expected
exit 1
fi

The secret is the quotes around the $1.

The more recent versions of Solaris come with an online patching utility smpatch. This requires access to various servers on the public Internet. I cannot find any definitive documentation on exactly which servers are accessed, the documentation only suggests updates.sun.com, but this is patently not the whole story. There seems to be a system of redirects and load balancers in place that mean a bunch of other servers might be queried as well. This makes creating outbound firewall rule sets difficult.

So far I have made up the following list. The /24 networks are not entirely necessary, but I'd rather be a little generous here than having to add IPs to my rule set every time I want to patch. Access does seem to be restricted to port 443.

72.5.124.61
80.231.19.70
80.231.19.71
195.176.255.0/24
198.232.168.0/24

To search for a string, and then perform a vi command :

:g/string/command

for instance:

:%g/endofline$/join

will search for the string "endofline$" and then append the next line to any line that matches.

Vim documentation: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/