Sep 212012
 

It’s pretty annoying supporting both Windows and Linux systems. One of the things that comes up over and over is line endings. You’re about to run a script, and immediate get an error about the bash command not found or something bizarre like that. Fortunately, there are easy ways to fix this. (note, in the following, to type the ^M character, you’ll actually be typing ^V^M) Solution 1: use sed sed s/^M// Solution 2: use the same replacement string in vim :%s/^M//g Solution 3 (the really easy way): Use the dos2unix command that comes with most *nix distros: dos2unix

Feb 022011
 

What a great day today in terms of Unix shell discoveries. Early in the morning, I bought iSSH for iPad and was blown away by how functional it was. The iPad is actually useful now besides being an overpriced e-reader. In the afternoon, someone pointed out ack to me instead of using grep. Faster search, here I come. Finally, just a few minutes ago, I discovered “cd -“, “pushd” and “popd”. No more need to set temporary aliases when I bounce back and forth between directories.

Apr 252008
 

Thie great article from Lifehacker details how to ease the transition into the newest distribution of Ubuntu, especially if you’re giving up Windows or Mac OSX for the first time, and are wondering how you can do all the stuff you used to. And of course, Ubuntu Hardy Heron is a Longterm Support Release (LTS), so you will be able to get online support for it for at least the next three years if you have the desktop version, and at least the next five years if you have the server version.