If you’re trying to learn Docker you will first have to master its various terminal commands. This guide aims to help you get started with basic docker commands.

I've now learned that grep can, halfway through grepping in a file, think
the file is suddenly binary and stop returning results.

xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. Commands should be simple, fast and composable:

Simple tasks should be easy.
Performance trade offs should be exposed in the CLI interface.
Composition should not come at the expense of performance.

Ncdu is a command line tool to view and analyse disk space usage on linux. It can drill down into directories and report space used by individual directories. This way it is very easy to track down space consuming files/directories. It actually allows the user to do this much faster than even a gui file manager. On the server ofcourse gui tools are not present.

Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.

Some commenters requested that we use our restored vintage 1930 Model 15 Teletype as a terminal for Linux. Hooking up a 5-bit Baudot mechanical contraption to a modern OS, even one that is terminal friendly, is not without some challenges: adapting to the non-standard high voltage 60 mA current loop, interfacing ASCII to the much smaller and different Baudot encoding, working in all caps, dealing with Baudot FIGS and LTRS modes, and making sure the computer doesn't overrun the pokey 45.5 bauds connection. But hey, Unix was developed on (much more modern 8-bit) teletypes, so that should still work, shouldn't it?

The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'"

McIlroy's example of this dictum is:

Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be done better and more flexibly by a separate program.

If you open up a manpage for ls on mac, you’ll see that it starts with

ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

That is, the one-letter flags to ls include every lowercase letter except for {jvyz}, 14 uppercase letters, plus @ and 1. That’s 22 + 14 + 2 = 38 single-character options alone.

I recently asked our writer community to share with us what they're reading. These folks come from all different walks of life and roles in tech. What they have in common is that they are living and breathing Linux and open source every day.

Drink in this fantastic list. Many of them are free and available to download.

You may see books you've been meaning to get around to, books that are completely new to you, and some that feel like old friends.

One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc.

When working with text data, the philosophy is to break any complex problem you have into a set of smaller ones, and to solve each of them with a specialized tool.

Once in a while a new program really surprises me. Reminiscing a while
ago, I came up with a list of eye-opening Unix gems. Only a couple of
these programs are indispensable or much used. What singles them out is
their originality. I cannot imagine myself inventing any of them.

Meld is a visual diff tool that makes it easier to compare and merge changes in files, directories, Git repos, and more.

As we can see the default Linux disk encryption implementation has a significant impact on our cache latency in worst case scenarios, whereas the patched implementation is indistinguishable from not using encryption at all. In other words the improved encryption implementation does not have any impact at all on our cache response speed, so we basically get it for free! That’s a win!

Ever considered setting up and running your very own git server? It’s actually quite easy! In this post, I’ll outline the steps I took to set up my own so that you can give it a try yourself. But first, why might you even want to go through the trouble of setting up your own server?

After all, there are a wide array of excellent and free to use choices out there, such as GitHub, GitLab, and the up-and-coming sourcehut.

One reason is ownership: in today’s world of corporate surveillance, rampant privacy violations, and data breaches, there is something to be said of truly owning your own data. Both git and the web itself were designed and built on principles of decentralization and distribution. Standing up your own server is one way to tap into that heritage.

It’s also just plain fun, at least if you’re into that sort of thing. You get to build something useful and put your name on it. It’s something you control. You get to decide how it works, how it looks, who can access it, and what exists on it.

Setting up a git server is actually relatively straight-forward. Almost all of the heavy lifting is done by git itself, but I will also introduce a few supplementary tools to handle things like access control and HTTP access.

Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post. Let’s look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let’s download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.

SSH is a powerful tool which often grants a lot of access to anyone using it to log into a server. In this post, I’m going to talk about a few different ways that you can easily improve the security of your SSH model without needing to deploy a new application or make any huge changes to user experience.

This article is about how pipes are implemented the Unix kernel. I was a little disappointed that a recent article titled “How do Unix pipes work?” was not about the internals, and curious enough to go digging in some old sources to try to answer the question.

he /sbin/mount.nfs helper program is provided by nfs-common. You can install it with:
sudo apt install nfs-common

sudo mount 192.168.1.5:/home/shared /mnt/common

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdd
sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sdd4
sudo mdadm -A -R /dev/md9 /dev/sdd4
sudo mount /dev/md9 /mnt/old_hdd/

In the 1960s-1970s, Ken Thompson co-invented the UNIX operating system along with Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. He also worked on the language B, the operating system Plan 9, and the language Go. He and Ritchie won the Turing Award. He now works at Google. He’ll be interviewed Brian Kernighan of “K&R” fame. This talk took place May 4, 2019. Videography courtesy of @thegurumeditation (Facebook), @thegurumeditate (Twitter)

Parameter expansion is the procedure to get the value from the referenced entity, like expanding a variable to print its value. On expansion time you can do very nasty things with the parameter or its value. These things are described here.