one-liners
gregladen | November 14, 2009In the old days, you could just use the "help" menu item to figure this out (drilling down to "about") but now there is so much "helpful" crap in the dialog that opens when you do so, that it has become much less helpful.
So just open a command line and cause the contents of the files that contain your release information to be fed to standard output.
i.e., type:
cat /etc/*-release
gregladen | November 2, 2009Google is great, and yes, I know all those tricks that make it greater. But I still want to use REGEX in some cases. So, I figured out a way to do that, in theory, all I need now is the code...
Briefly, the software I need, which I shall call googlereg for now, feeds the harvest from a google search through a regex filter and produces a list of hits.
There are three streams of data that could be fed through the regex filter: The basic output of the Google search (what you see as results on a Google search page), the actual pages found by the Google search, and the entire site at the domain…
gregladen | September 12, 2008In many instances, a well thought-out regular expression can convince most non-technical people in the room that you're a computer genius who's brain possesses more synapses, forming more bridges and firing more rapidly than anyone's ever should.
Oh this is so true. The other day I was working on cleaning up some data with a colleague. We had two simple but common problems with our database, which had a few thousand records, and forty or so variables.
1) We needed to get a subset of data that included means for all numeric values based on a single factor (a factor = a categorical variable…
gregladen | August 1, 2008ls | wc -l
How many files are in the current directory on my hard drive?
The command ls gives me a list of files (ls stands for "list stuff")
the vertical line is a pipe. This means the standard output of the left side of the pipe is sent (like in a pipe) to the standard input of the right side.
wc means "word count" ... the default output is the number of lines, nmber of words, and number of bytes for a file or for standard input. the -l option puts out only the number of lines. That, then, is the number of files.
Try it!