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 [...]

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 [...]

& – 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 [...]

Now here’s a really interesting feature article on Unix history and how it came to be. It’s quite amazing how successful a piece of software has become and how it came to influence the world of computing in the past (roughly) 40 years. “They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People [...]

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 best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the [...]