If you are not familiar with screen (and you use the UNIX command line regularly), you are missing out. I’ve added a new command-line tools section to my tools page. The screen bit, with a link to a good tutorial, is here.

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Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard my phone ring out a text message tone. (Incidentally, it’s this sound, a customized version of one found on the Monty Python website. It can be startling.)
I leaned over to look at it. The head node from the cluster was checking in to let me [...]

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UNIX-like operating systems are immensely powerful. They give one access to the minutest details of the operating system with command-line utilities. The major downside of command-line interfaces is that it is not readily apparent which commands are available and what they do. One can spend hours poring through man pages looking for related program names, [...]

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Occasionally when using Linux (or Mac OS X) I’ll notice a tongue-in-cheek output message from a utility. Today, it was ‘file‘, a program that uses magic numbers and other tricks to tell you about the contents of a file:

[brock@stilgar][Darwin]-(~/Workspace/RvPacing/bridge/flma2memfem)-> file bridge_w_surf.flma
bridge_w_surf.flma: ASCII text, with very long lines
[brock@stilgar][Darwin]-(~/Workspace/RvPacing/bridge/flma2memfem)->

Emphasis mine. Thanks for the commentary, file.
ADDENDUM: Just now, [...]

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Imagine this: You have two text files full of information, with one data entry on each line. You want to find out which lines occur in both files. Now, if the files are mostly the same, it’s probably best to use a program called diff. However, if the files are mostly different, you can [...]

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