Category: linux
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Picasa 3 collages
thanksgiving collage I upgraded to Picasa 3 a couple weeks ago. I didn’t upgrade right away, because it took awhile for the linux version to come out. I can happily say that Picasa 3 works great under linux from my experience. It was easy to install (they had an rpm available), and it runs very…
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Why doesn’t Mac update standard UNIX utilities?
I am currently teaching a course on programming for linguists. We are using python, but for the first few classes, I have been going over some standard UNIX utilities like cd, ls and such, plus using regular expressions with grep and sed. I actually don’t use sed that much. I tend to reach for perl,…
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Strange bracketing behavior in grep and sed
I finally figured out this thorny issue I have been dealing with for the last hour. In perl, if I can create a character class like “[\[\]a-f]” which matches any characters a-f, [, and ]. This does not work in grep or sed though. I finally discovered that the right bracket “]” should not be…
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Bash one-liners to the rescue
I recently find myself using handy bash one-liners more all the time. I think that this is where unix/linux can really start to shine. There are so many little programs that just do one thing, and one thing well. But the ability to combine these together through pipes means you have extremely flexible and powerful…
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sort using TAB as field separator in bash
I have run into this problem several times recently, and decided to finally write down the solution for myself rather than keep searching the internet for it. This is the problem: if you want to sort a file that is tab-delimited (and some of the filelds contain spaces), then you must explicitly tell sort to…