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Posts tagged with unix.
The w command displays a summary of the current activity on the system, including what each user is doing. The heading line shows the current time, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users logged into the system, and the average number of jobs in the run queue over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
Via Andre Torrez
Gow (Gnu On Windows) is the lightweight alternative to Cygwin. It uses a convenient “Windows installer” that installs about 130 extremely useful open source UNIX applications compiled as native win32 binaries. It is designed to be as small as possible, about 10 MB, as opposed to Cygwin which can run well over 100 MB depending upon options.
When I posted about nag, the little todo list manager I made, Christian Neukirchen1 got in touch with the following quote from Henry Spencer:
Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
It’s a fair cop. Here’s Christian’s nag equivalent:
alias n='head -1 ~/.nag'
alias na='echo >> ~/.nag'
alias nl='nl ~/.nag'
function nd() { sed -i ${1:-1}d ~/.nag }
alias nc='true > ~/.nag'
A far simpler solution than my 91 lines of beginners’ Python!
Christian ran the first tumblelog, Anarchia which along with projectionist spurred me to start the unimaginatively-named Tumble back in 2005. ↩
Here you can browse the source code and manuals of various old versions of Unix. For every file, you can also find related files from other versions: this can help show how the different versions of Unix are related.
Via HN
The first public release of V7/x86, a port of UNIX Version 7 to the x86 (IA-32) based PC is now available. UNIX V7 was the last general distribution (around 1979) to come from the Research group at Bell Labs, the original home of UNIX.
You know you want to.
By ‘you’ I mean ‘I’ and by ‘want to’ I mean ‘will probably spend three hours getting it to work in a virtual machine for no apparent reason’.
Convert human-readable time into Unix timestamps, and vice-versa.
Thanks, craiga.
The tr utility copies the standard input to the standard output with substitution or deletion of selected characters.
You might use it to convert text from upper to lower case:
cat upper-case.txt | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' > lower-case.txt
Or to extract a list of all the words used in a text:
tr -cs '[:lower:][:upper:]' '[\n*]' words.txt
Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser for RISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux) and more.
Netsurf might not be bang up to date with the latest web technologies, but it certainly is fast—useful for those unwilling to take on one of the ultraminimal browsers but needing something lighter than Firefox, Chrome, &c..
ii is a minimalist FIFO and filesystem-based IRC client. It creates an irc directory tree with server, channel and nick name directories. In every directory a FIFO in file and a normal out file is created.
I suspected ii might appeal more in theory than in practice, but these setup instructions show that it can be shaped into a very capable IRC client with a couple of helper applications and a short script.
9wm is an X window manager which attempts to emulate the Plan 9 window manager 8-1/2 as far as possible within the constraints imposed by X. It provides a simple yet comfortable user interface, without garish decorations or title-bars. Or icons.
I’m fascinated by Plan 9 from Bell Labs, an esoteric operating system intended as a replacement for Unix—in Plan 9, absolutely everything is represented as a file in the file system, and there’s essentially no difference between local and remote resources.
9wm (when combined with Plan 9 from User Space) can give you a taste of Plan 9 proper on Unix-like systems.
Or, if you’re not a weird
The cal utility displays a simple calendar in traditional format
A quick way to see the date the Tuesday after next, or what day of the week it will be on 22nd July.
Homebrew is the easiest and most flexible way to install the UNIX tools Apple didn’t include with OS X.
A very promising alternative to MacPorts. And, since Homebrew sensibly installs under /usr/local, you can give it a try without mucking up your existing MacPorts installations (though if you plan to switch, getting rid of MacPorts entirely seems like a good idea).
Thanks, Adam and @iferguson90.
