Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.
And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.
Yet another bug that I submitted to Red Hat Bugzilla got fixed. This time it took more than a year – from 21 May 2004 until 12 September 2005 – but a workaround was found much earlier and could be easily applied.
P.S.: I was stupid enough not to notice that the bug was closed and add another comment today. Nuthead!
Many beginning Linux users experience difficulties getting used to the filesystem structure. Indeed, there are many files and directories, the structure of which are not as obvious as it could be. Choosing an appropriate location for a new file or directory is difficult and many choose to follow their own instincts.
With more experience, the file hierarchy becomes clearer and old concepts of placing files and directories start to fade out. When it happens, finding things becomes difficult. It is than that users learn that Linux has many tools for finding things. And it is than that they become confused once again.
Read on for a quick introduction into searching tools available in Linux.
Continue reading Finding files in Linux
The collegue of mine came across a problem that developed into an interesting solution that I decided to share with the world. Actually, I think the world is pretty much aware of the solution, but just in case that I will ever be looking for this solution again, I’ll have it handy here.
The task at hand was to do some processing of the logs on the fly. The syslog was configured to filter the appropriate logs into a named pipe and a Perl script was written to read from the said pipe and do all the processing.
The original piece of code looked something like this:
open (SYSLOG, "<$named_pipe") or die "Couldn't open $named_pipe: $!\n"; while () { do_processing($_); } close(SYSLOG);
The problem came with syslog daemon restarts. Every time the syslog was stopped, the EOF was sent to the pipe and the script stopped reading it.
Continue reading Working with named pipes in Perl
Today’s links belong to one of the two topics – visual arts or technology.
Visual arts (photography, graffiti, posters, and fashion):
Technology:
These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-30.
Here is a quick tip if you need to merge two AVI files into one using Linux. In fact, you can glue together more than two files. You can glue together as many as you want.
avimerge -o result.avi -i source1.avi source2.aviavimerge is a part of transcode package.