I have sometimes seen people use a pipeline that includes "sort | uniq". The result of that is no different than just adding a -u flag to sort and absolutely requires more time and processing power - not that it usually matters; unless the input is humongously long, you'd need to run them through "time" to spot any difference. So why use "uniq"?

For cases like that, where there is no difference in the output, it's probably just habit - you may be accustomed to using "uniq" for other jobs and just reach for it automatically. I'll argue that it's a good habit to have: if you are in the habit of using "sort -u", you may tend to forget about "uniq" and that could cause you do do something much more difficult and clumsy when a job needs something that "uniq" does well.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Girish Venkatachalam is a UNIX hacker with more than a decade of networking and crypto programming experience. His hobbies include yoga,cycling, cooking and he runs his own business. Details here:

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It is really easy to create a USB bootable OpenBSD LiveUSB image. With that you can do just about anything you want. Don't believe me?

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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Google has introduced Go. Normally, the announcement of a new language isn't likely to get me to even click through to read about it - what do I need a new language for? Can't I get myself screwed up enough with the languages I already know?

Well, the names on the Go design team rung a few bells: Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley. Yes, THAT Rob Pike, THAT Ken Thompson.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

A customer bought a Linksys print server. It comes with a Windows CD that is supposed to allow you to configure the box, but with his Windows Vista machines, the print server couldn't be found. Probably the software doesn't work well with Vista.

More aggravatingly, I couldn't find a MAC address printed anywhere on the device, so I couldn't set an IP with arp -s (which then would have let me finish configuring the device using a browser).

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

At any Linux/Unix forum a large number of posts have to do with sed and awk - how do I do this, how do I do that?

I can see using sed. It's quick, it's simple (unless we are doing something complicated) and easy to learn. On the other hand, we have "awk", which is nasty and error prone even in its most basic invocations.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Let's jazz up some Bash scripts today, shall we?

This post was prompted by a forum posting at another site where someone had a script that echoed "Pass' or "Fail" and he wanted "Pass" in green and "Fail" in Red.

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A customer reported that a Linux machine used for ssh access (to in turn give telnet access to an ancient SCO machine) was refusing logins. I asked him to try logging in as root at the console; he was unable to do so.

When I arrived on site, I found that I could not login as he had said. I rebooted to single use mode and started peeking around. The machine had been hacked; there was little doubt about that. It's HOW it was hacked that bothers me,

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Yesterday a customer called because he needed to be able to write into a certain share on his Samba server. I ssh'd right in, made the change to the config file, restarted Samba and shot him off an "All set!" email.

Such confidence had I that immediately after hitting send, I left my house to do some errands and when I realized I had forgotten my phone, I didn't even bother to go back for it: everything is under control, all pigs are fed and ready to fly.

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I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Let me first apologize to the people who don't yet have Wave accounts - it must be very boring and also frustrating listening to people wax on about things you can't yet experience.

On that note, I do have a few invitations left for regular contributors, customers, and so on.. Just drop me an email.

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I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

There are people who don't understand Google Wave. There are people who don't like Google Wave. There are people who do understand Wave, and people who do like it. Most of those who don't like it just don't understand it, but even a few who do understand still don't like it.

Most (maybe even all) of the complaints you'll hear about Wave are gripes about problems that obviously will be fixed as this progresses out if its current "Preview" stage. Most of the complaints are also client-side implementation issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying concepts. You need to keep that in mind when listening to negative comments.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Thanks to one of our readers (thanks again, Donal) I got a Google Wave invitation Friday morning. By the way - if someone says they have sent you an invitation, you may have to wait: Donal said that he had sent that invitation on Monday. I don't know if Google is just slow in processing these or if they are deliberately doling them out slowly (probably the latter), but once you actually get your invite, you can be up and working in minutes.

I started out using Wave in my Firefox browser, but quickly switched to Waveboard, a Mac Wave client. It's not that it's all that much better than running Wave in a browser; it's just that I like having it in its own Dock icon.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

When we first moved here, our address didn't exist in Google Maps, nor could anything but dirt be seen in the satellite images. That changed soon enough and for some time now I've been able to plug in my home address as a starting point for directions.

A year or so ago, I started having a little trouble with that. The reason was because someone I do business with added me to a user generated map. From that point on, Google saw my address as a business address, and would react by asking "Did you mean A.P. Lawrence?". I'd just click on that and everything would be fine.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.