Bash parameter expansion

If you’ve ever written a bash script with variables, and know that it wasn’t your last one,  I promise you, you’ll love this wiki page.  It covers a whole lot of different ways to expand and manipulate variable values in bash, all on a single, conveniently organized page.

The best way to get the full PHP version string

Jeff Geerling shares the best way to get the full PHP version string.  I’d think that “php –version” externally or “echo PHP_VERSION” internally would do the job.  However, that’s not exactly right, as there are a number of inconsistencies on different platforms.  The best option seems to be the combination of the PHP_MAJOR_VERSION, PHP_MINOR_VERSION, and PHP_RELEASE_VERSION constants.

$ php -r 'echo join(".",[PHP_MAJOR_VERSION,PHP_MINOR_VERSION,PHP_RELEASE_VERSION]);'
7.2.12

jq: deep comparison of 5GB files

I’ve blogged about jq – a lightweight and flexible command line JSON processor – a few times already (look here and here).  Today I came across this blog post that showcases jq in deep comparison of really large JSON files (5 GB or so).  This is not something that I need on a daily basis, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy one day.

Unix Folklore

Unix Folklore brings back a few bits of UNIX history from the Bell Labs:

The UNIX operating system, which was created by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others at Bell Labs in the early 1970’s, revolutionized the computer industry in ways that are still felt today. Researchers at Bell Labs continued to develop UNIX (in various forms) for more than 30 years. For most of that time, UNIX researchers shared the same physical lab space which allowed a lot of folklore to accumulate over the decades. The lab is now gone but archivists at Bell Labs saved everything that was in the room – creating a time capsule of computing’s past. These are some of the curiosities taken from the UNIX research lab at Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Each has its own story – some widely known, others now forgotten.

DevHub: TweetDeck for GitHub

If you are spending a lot of time on GitHub, following people, teams, and projects, then checkout DevHub – a TweetDeck-like application for GitHub that works on Android, iOS, and as a web application.

It conveniently brings together your repositories, notifications, and all the other goodies, helping you to significantly cut down the time and mouse clicks.