Topic

Mostly Unixish

Mostly Unixish is where I collect some good tips and tricks for Linux, MacOS X and (sometimes) other *nixes.

Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES

How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell replacement when bash/zsh scripts get too complex, but there's one caveat: as long as you can

Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap

As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does the university teach students this way?

SCP taming: stop local silliness

Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these days; very often, if either hosts

Command line data crunching with Python

Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes stretching their

Git: automatically set and use multiple commit identities

Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of forgetting about it is about 99.9%. Problem context When installing git, it is required to configure a username and

badblocks: test your mass storage!

Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros and in macOS if you install the ext2fs tools: sudo badblocks -swv -t random -b 4096 -c 2048 <DEVICE> It will perform

Automated cleanup of Docker leavings

As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. There're generally two kinds of Docker Waste: Exited containers. Unless you used run --rm when running a new container from an image, docker doesn't

Python requests SSL and InsecurePlatformWarning

Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems to trigger the issue frequently - but I've seen it on some combinations of pip inside virtualenv as well - you'll get an error

chmod and the capital X

This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, e.g. something like 700 for directories and 600 for files, and you need to give access to some other group and not just

Kill Me Softly: killing a process The Right Way

I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all my knowledge has been permanently dumped here: Kill Me Softly on GitHub If you want to kill a process by letting it to exit