Tag Archives: shell hackery

HOWTO: Mount your USB hard drives at boot time on Ubuntu

I’ve got a number of external USB hard drives connected to my ubuntu server that need to mount to a predictable directory. When you log into Gnome, the desktop environment does it’s nifty thing and mounts any drive you’ve got … Continue reading

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Set up JAVA_HOME to track Java Preferences.app on Mac OS X

Mac OS X’s Java Preferences.app has a pane for switching between versions of the JDK, but I just found out from a coworker (thanks, Mike!) that you can make your shell match that preference easily — just add this to … Continue reading

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HOWTO install etherpad on ubuntu 9.10

Etherpad was opensourced by google, and has some generic installation instructions. Here’s the translation for Ubuntu Karmic Koala (release 9.10):

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How to Convert Your Book’s Images to Kindle

Taking your painstakingly typeset book and shoving it through the kindle “conversion” meatgrinder was an exercise in wincing. Most of the images were corrupted, there was whitespace sprinkled randomly throughout the copy, and it was a general mess. Kindle supports … Continue reading

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Using Mac OS X 10.5′s keychain for ssh

The version of ssh that comes with Mac OS X 10.5.6 has a -K option that stores your passphrases in your system’s keychain. Run this: ssh-add -K [path to private keyfile] Provide your passphrase once when asked, and keychain will … Continue reading

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Make “ps -ef” work in a shell on Mac OS X

If you’re used to SunOS or BSD, you’ll be at home with Mac OS X’s “ps -aux” to get a process list from a shell prompt. If you’ve been using any other recent unix, though, your fingers will want to … Continue reading

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Preventing an external hard drive from idling on ubuntu

I got a Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive for backups (JWZ has a very straightforward article about this). It happily reformatted to ext3, and I kicked off an rsync of /home. Because rsync figures out what files need copying … Continue reading

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Dealing with a directory with ~∞ files

Got a directory with > 10K of files? Need to move them up one directory? mv will fail you: $ mv * .. -bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long The solution is to list the files one line at a … Continue reading

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Verifying file integrity with debsums

After upgrading my Ubuntu server, some security applications grumped about changed contents of some common binaries. Just to be safe, I wanted to verify them explicitly with debsums, but debsums looks for package names, not paths to binaries. Here’s a … Continue reading

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Running a command for all files whose name matches…

I found a stray image named “img_1234.jpg” on a laptop and wanted to see if I already had it on my server. On my Mac I could use spotlight’s nifty “kind:image” filter along with quicklook. Macworld has a great article … Continue reading

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