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We spent so much time scripting out TV, it's time to get some online reading in ;) For some reason, it's Monday again and time for another "online reference ripper" script. For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script we're going to do the (almost) exact opposite of what we've been doing for the past few weeks.

A very nice collection of helpful, if not made-up, command references :) Today, while out trudging through the wasteland of that thingy they call the Internet, looking far and wide for stuff to make me chuckle, I ran across this awesome collection of fake, and funny, man pages. The clip in today's post is from the New Man Pages page, which you can check out for links to even more humour and an unexpurgated version of this page.

An interesting take on Linux usability testing for the mainstream :) This Saturday's over-sized slice of, possibly funny, Linux humour comes to use via ITKnowledgeExchange. It's actually a review of an original article entitled "Linux: The Girlfriend Test" from TechRadar.com.

Just dealing with the OS error message. This post has nothing whatsoever to do with marriage ;) Here's a question that gets asked a lot (and, consequently, answered a lot ;) on the boards. How do you go about dealing with a situation in which you're trying to take care of some business on your Linux or Unix box and you get stopped with the "Argument list too long" error message? It's probably happened to all of us at some point, but it's fairly simple to avoid, and in more than one way.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey :)

Why would you ever need to do this? Why, indeed... ;) The first question you might be asking yourself is "Why in the world would I ever want, or even need, to do this?" Since I'm a somewhat-honest guy who writes from the hip, I'll tell you that, depending upon where you work and what kind of setup you have there, you may never ever need to do this. If (worst case) you can get a console connection to your server (which you'll need for this method, anyway) and have onsite staff that can pop a cd in a working drive, you probably wouldn't even want to do this. So, the simple answer is: Why not?

How to figure out if your local filesystem is the thing that's giving you heartburn today ;) Today we're going to take a look at some quick and easy ways to determine if you have a problem with your local filesystem on SUSE Linux (tested on 8.x and 9.x). Of course, we're assuming that you have some sort of an i/o wait issue and the users are blaming it on the local disk.

The public has decided that this should be moved to a SourceForge project, and it shall be so... after today :)

No one ever suspected how bad an all out clash between MS and Linux enthusiasts could get...Happy Sunday :) Hope yours is as restful as I expect mine to be. Since I write these posts at least a day in advance I can only say with a slight degree of certainty that I'm feeling better than I ever have and it's been a good long while since I've been quite so relaxed... possibly ;)

An easy way to keep track of user groups in passwd to cap off the business week. Today we're going to shoot out another quick scriptlet that might be useful (or distracting ;) from time to time. It’s a bit of a follow up on our post from earlier this week on using bash to produce fancy user names for folks logged into your machine, although it’s a little bit longer.

An attempt to explain an awk program, with a nested if statement within a for loop, in plain English. Today's post is going to be a follow-up to yesterday's post on convoluted column arithmetic in awk. I have a nasty habit of listing all my stuff as "beginner" material. Mostly this is because I try to write my material for the middle level to newer user of Unix, Linux, Perl, etc. I have absolutely no interest in picking apart the finer points of quantum mathematics or advanced concepts in programming or operating system design and implementation.

These may not cover every base, but they probably cover at least one base that you don't see covered much ;) Today's going to be a "fun with awk" day. I figure we should have one now because we never had them in school when I was a kid... The topic, as the title suggests, has to do with columnar arithmetic or, less pompously put, performing arithmetic operations on columns or, even more accessibly, adding stuff up ;) It's somewhat like our older post on doing simple cumulative math with awk, but slightly more confusing.

Sometimes it's nice to know the company you keep ;) Today we're going to shoot out a quick one liner script that can come in handy from time to time. It doesn't fall under the "necessary" category (or, maybe not even the "useful" one ;), but it's nice to have for those times when you just don't feel like doing any extra typing or expending the effort required to separate the wheat from the chaff on a screen full of garbage output. That is, as I've always understood, one of the main reasons to script things out in the first place.

A few more improvements, and a possible move to "project" status - your opinion will decide! I'm beginning to think that this script should be put on my SourceForge page and maintained there. It's not that I mind doing these weekly updates, but I feel like I'm writing the same thing over and over again, where I could be offering you, the reader, more value by producing different scripts in its place.

We all knew it was only a matter of time until the bit bucket flowed over ;) This is a humorous little fake CERT-like advisory concerning the implementation of /dev/null on all Unix and Linux operating systems and the disastrous effects of ignoring the problem. The bit I've put here was pulled from Ian's Humor Pages, which you might want to check out and find all the other funny stuff on there.

It's been around for a while, but I've finally found my favorite stick-figure online computer-humor :) Hope your Saturday is going okay and that you're reading this in the evening or late afternoon (since, if you're like me, that's breakfast time ;) To start off this week's Linux and Unix humor section, I went looking around all 4 corners of the earth for something that made me laugh (at the very least, on the inside ;) and I ran back over a site that I'd actually used one cartoon from in a previous humor post. The site's name is XKCD and, after spending a while browsing through the tons of content on the site, I found that I liked way too many of the cartoons to include them all here.

Some quick steps to resolve a few basic issues with VCS faults. For the end of the week, we're going to continue with the theme of sparse-but-hopefully useful information. Quick little "crib sheets" (preceding by paragraphs and paragraphs of stilted ramblings by the lunatic who pens this blog's content ;) For this Friday, we're going to come back around and take a look at Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) troubleshooting.

The good, the bad and the confusing of determining cpu properties on various nix systems. Today, in keeping with yesterday's theme of covering a fairly specific topic and trolling it around the seamy underbelly of the world of Unix and Linux, we're going to take a look at how to grab CPU information from your Unix or Linux box. I try to cover the major distros here, but (of course) my resources are limited and (except for the HP-UX example below) I've personally run and verified all of the results of the commands put out in this post today.

Is nothing sacred? A look at a few AIX commands that can make your life simpler. Today's topic, and accompanying script, have to do with a more specific function already described in our series on working with AIX LVM (Actually, that link points to the last entry in the series. It's a strange thing about serialized content; the only way I can hook you up with a link that will get you links from part 4 to parts 3, 2 and 1 is to give you the last link.

See your comments and suggestions for improvements in action ...for the most part ;) For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script, we're following up on our script from last week, with more user suggested improvements, that makes it so you can get your local TV listings from the command line with bash. This week's script is an update to include a lot of error checking and (from the suggestion I received the most often :) the ability to pick a time span.