Here is a a really very detailed explanation (with examples) of how a program ends up going from code to an executable that your processor can run. This post details all of the steps along the way, from the original code, compiling, compiler optimizations, assembly, machine code, etc. The Birth and Death of a Running [...]

If you’re using a Unix or Unix-like operating system you can leverage the GNU iconv library to validate the encoding of a file or files. Although, the GNU iconv library is actually meant to do file conversions, it can still be used in a way that will give you some understanding if the file(s) contain [...]

original source: 16 Linux Server Monitoring Commands You Really Need To Know iostat The iostat command shows in detail what your storage subsystem is up to. You usually use iostat to monitor how well your storage sub-systems are working in general and to spot slow input/output problems before your clients notice that the server is [...]

Some tricks covered in the article include: using passwordless, key-based login; setting up local per-host configurations; exporting a local service through a firewall; accessing a remote service through a firewall; setting up a SOCKS proxy for Firefox; executing commands remotely from scripts; transfering files to/from remote machines; mounting a filesystem through SSH; and triggering admin [...]

“In the early days computers were much simpler. The various components of a system, such as the CPU, memory, mass storage, and network interfaces, were developed together and, as a result, were quite balanced in their performance. For example, the memory and network interfaces were not (much) faster than the CPU at providing data. This [...]

& – This causes the application to run in the background. You will get a new shell prompt after issuing this command. nohup and disown – Both of these prevent SIGHUP (hangup) signals so the application isn’t killed when the terminal session is closed. nohup does this when the job starts. disown can be used [...]

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Now here is a good article (mainly for Unix beginners) that outlines some of the most useful basic Unix commands available.  Read the article here: Unix Command Line Fu (via kresimirbojcic.com). The article covers commands such as: cut, grep, sort, uniq, cat, tac, join, tail, head, etc. It also tells you a bit about how [...]

The following quoted text is an excerpt from the article “Awesome but often unknown Linux commands and tools (anchor.com.au)” which I found really useful! There are quite a few lesser-known Linux/Unix commands that can prove to be extremely useful. This quoted text outlines just a few of these, but there are many more out there… [...]

I’ve been messing around with rsync lately on one of my linux machines. I’ve been looking for a simple solution that would provide something similar to Apple’s Time Machine software. There are obviously some open source packages that could provide this functionality for me, but I just wanted something really simple that could be automated. [...]