schof.org A journal of learning and doing

One of the most important parts of setting up a new computer (for a geek like me) is getting the Terminal set up right. I spend a lot of time there. I wrote about this in 2006, and I think it's time to update my Terminal setup notes for Lion …

One of my clients (a Mac-based computer consulting company here in Los Angeles) had a BASH script they wanted me to look at -- a couple of things weren't working the way the client thought they should be working.

The client's issues are resolved, but I noticed something in the script …

This is the sort of thing that's second nature to a command-line geek, but I thought it was cool enough (in its little way) to share.

The problem: I have a process that runs on a remote server for quite a while. I wish to be alerted when it completes …

It generally works pretty well, but I found the following problem, and Google was no help:

Building the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.

Using compiler "/usr/bin/gcc". Use environment variable CC to override.

Unable to compile the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.

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The VMware VmPerl Scripting API was not installed. Errors …

for afile in /home/auser/adirectory/*; do echo $afile; done

Useful for all kinds of things. And I can never remember how the syntax changes between doing a for statement in a bash script and doing it as a one-liner on the command line.

I follow the Ubuntu Geek blog, and have found some very useful tips there. However, there's a problem with their latest tip, "Howto Check you (sic) external IP Address from the command line."

Some background: There's a very useful website located at whatismyip.com, which reports the IP you used …

I'm putting together a postinst (post installation) script for a Debian package I created for work. And there's a little C program in there that needs to run as root, but be called by a regular user.

Well, there's a standard way of doing that in Linux/Unix, called setuid …

Say you've got a Subversion source code tree checked out, and for whatever reason you want to remove all Subversion directories inside that tree. (The thing that makes a Subversion tree a Subversion tree is the presence of a ".svn" folder in every folder of the tree. If you had …