xargs parallelizes with -Pn
The most surprising Unix programs
151–160 of 182 posts
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#152For me, the most surprising one was paste. paste allowed me to interleave to streams or to split out a single stream into two columns. I'd been writing custom scripting monstrosities before I discovered paste: $ paste I wonder what other unix gems I've been missing...
I would guess, from experience of people doing things the hard way, at: * John A. Kunze's jot and rs * John Kerl's mlr ("Miller") * jq * join and comm, as mentioned * fmt * ex And, given what you just wrote: * printf
Do I remember correctly that “jot” was also the name of a gui text editor on unix systems as well (different from the program referred to in the parent comment)? I think I used it in the early 90s on an SGI workstation running sun solaris OS.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#153What does he man by "record structure in the file system" in re to Multics?
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would guess, from experience of people doing things the hard way, at: * John A. Kunze's jot and rs * John Kerl's mlr ("Miller") * jq * join and comm, as mentioned * fmt * ex And, given what you just wrote: * printf
Do I remember correctly that “jot” was also the name of a gui text editor on unix systems as well (different from the program referred to in the parent comment)? I think I used it in the early 90s on an SGI workstation running sun solaris OS.
Yes, I remember a jot being the “notepad” of SGI workstations. Didn’t take me long to move on to nedit instead.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please file bugs for any message that is confusing! We track them like any other bug, and there’s some folks actively working on them.
I'll keep that in mind for future interaction with rustc, thanks. Just to double check, you are referring to Github issues on the rust-lang/rust repository, right?
I am!
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#156I didn't knew about typo. One surprising unix program I discovered this year is cal (or ncal). Having a calendar in your terminal is sometimes useful and I wish I knew earlier I could type things like ncal -w 2020
A similarly flavored one I’ve always appreciated is the man page for ascii, which shows the octal, decimal, and hex values for each character in the ASCII space. Most unixes have one, although the format differs.
How have I been googling ASCII codes for two decades with this right under my fingertips?!? Thank you!
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#157killall5 is the most bizarre command that I learned recently. Read manpage before trying it.
So it's functionally equivalent to `kill` with PID of -1, which is what we used to use back in the old days anyway. `kill -9 -1` should only kill your user processes if you're not root.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's also why Catholic nuns were over-represented in early computing." Would you mind expanding on that?
Highly educated, and able to type. The first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science was a nun in Ohio. Catholic nuns have done much for the business world that is overlooked. From memory, so no citations: The first female CEOs were Catholic nuns — in the early 1900's, a time when women in the American workplace was uncommon, Catholic nuns founded over 800 hospitals in the United States. They also ran schools, colleg…
Fascinating, thanks. This all makes Sister Celine's contribution less surprising. I came across her in the classic A=B "about identities in general, and hypergeometric identities in particular, with emphasis on computer methods of discovery and proof." An amazing and wonderfully-written book.
https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#159For me, the most surprising one was paste. paste allowed me to interleave to streams or to split out a single stream into two columns. I'd been writing custom scripting monstrosities before I discovered paste: $ paste I wonder what other unix gems I've been missing...
Recently I found myself wanting to stop a program after a certain timeout. I found myself thinking "sure there's a UNIX program to do this in shell?" There is. And it's called... brace yourself... "timeout". 20+ years in UNIX, never encountered it. Part of GNU coreutils.
Sometimes good to use for cron jobs so that the previous one won't keep running on top of the current run.
You should debug for it to not happen though but probably better than seeing your system choke with dozens of instances even slowing the jobs more.
There's also "run-one" that allows you to control which job should survive instead of just killing the old one.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/run-one.1.ht...
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#160I didn't knew about typo. One surprising unix program I discovered this year is cal (or ncal). Having a calendar in your terminal is sometimes useful and I wish I knew earlier I could type things like ncal -w 2020
You might like gcal better as it can show holidays too.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/164555/how-to-empha...