111–120 of 145 posts
I didn't know about the units program. Is there any resource out there that lists these little *nix utility programs?
Another of the 10,000 here - this is such a delightful story. Also just discovered the "units" conversion program and disappointed that the default Mac library has only 586 units. And shockingly there don't seem to be compatible libraries out there.
`brew install gnu-units` should do it :) Edit: You'll then want to run it with `gunits` rather than `units`
This one comes up ever 3-4 years or so in sysadmin communities, and I read it every single time. because it's worth it. It's one of those things that I highly doubt would have occurred to me to have even checked, or given even a moments thought to, under normal circumstances.
Over the years, my Google-fu has failed me. Any clue? :)
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And this is why we can't have nice stories. I felt for the author as I got deeper into the faq, and recognized this pattern of cynicism, then decided the author was so generous and thorough, not out of obligation (make the emails stop!), but because that is the type of detailed person he is -- and good at dinner parties too!
Writing stories for a technical audience is tricky. I've been doing it for going on 10 years now, and I'm still not very good at it. A critical rule, however, is to omit detail, (a reader is unlikely to question an explanation they make up themselves) and most importantly, to omit details you know to be wrong . (It is impossible to nitpick a statement that is never said) An odd feature of our campus network at the ti…
I didn't know about the units program. Is there any resource out there that lists these little *nix utility programs?
units is nice, but there isn't much help, and the syntax isn't always easy to remember. It was fun to play with for a while, but wolframalpha.com is better.
This one comes up ever 3-4 years or so in sysadmin communities, and I read it every single time. because it's worth it. It's one of those things that I highly doubt would have occurred to me to have even checked, or given even a moments thought to, under normal circumstances.
I was looking for another famous sysadmin story, where the guy who also happens to be a top Linux developer (so maybe Alan Cox?) rescues a deeply broken Linux system where even glibc is no longer accessible by manipulating inodes in a running process. Or something. Over the years, my Google-fu has failed me. Any clue? :)
Another email incident at Microsoft worth reading [1]. [1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...
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> Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy. The point moreover was that he had a custom version of the config file (not just default).
Yes, sites have necessary customizations in sendmail.cf. These do not have to be rewrites that use shiny new syntax. My biggest problem with the author was not that he uses his admin blunders as a basis to call himself a good sysadmin, but that he assumed that the stats people were idiots who don't know anything about `puters or networks. I was not surprised by the 500 mile claim. It strikes me as obvious that the 50…
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What do you use it for?
One use is converting columns of numbers into math strings for bc. Example (contrived): $ seq 10 20 | paste -s -d + 10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20 $ seq 10 20 | paste -s -d + | bc 165 Or converting columns of strings into regex 'or' clauses for searching (contrived example again): $ cut -f 3 -d , something.csv | paste -s -d "|" a|b|c|d|e|f $ egrep "$(cut -f 3 -d , something.csv | paste -s -d "|")" another_file ...…
$ seq -s + 10 20
10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20
# a few random samples for an IN SQL statement
$ shuf -i 1-500000 -n 5 | paste -s -d ,
371492,250061,266669,455846,295852
# we can even get PI
$ ( seq -s + -f '4/%g' 1 4 100000 && seq -s - -f '4/%g' 3 4 100000 ) | paste -s -d - | bc -l
3.14157265358979523735I am actually surprised the sysadmin in this scenario thought it was a bad thing that the statistics department did their research and presented a well documented error.