Unix

vim

Uber editor by Bram Moolenaar. Stands for ‘vi mproved,’ alluding to its heritage from the first visual editor (vi == visual) for Unix.

Key mappings and tips

  • K — in normal mode, does a man of the word under the cursor.

Resources

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ZFS

(stub)

The Zettabyte File System is a high performance file system from Sun. Apple has announced that the server version of Mac OS X 10.6, “Snow Leopard” will have ZFS support. In addition to the tremendous benefits of adding drives to pools, it could dramatically change the concept of Time Machine. While it’s only been announced for the server version, it could trickle down to client as soon as 10.6.1. HFS+, the current file system for Mac OS, was also first included in a server release, and came down to the client later.

Resources

  • Why ZFS Matters to Mac Users
  • A PDF overview of ZFS, from the guys that created it.
  • Benchmarks comparing ZFS with XFS and Ext4.
  • Hate and Counter-Hate concerning the future implementation of ZFS in Mac OS X. It’s incredible to me how short-sighted people can be. Does anyone really believe that software or hardware don’t change? And, if it doesn’t work perfectly now or it’s unnecessary now means that somehow it will never work or be necessary? Sheesh.
  • Apple announces ZFS in Snow Leopard
    Money quote: “More capacity. Not more management.”
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Regular Expressions

Strange-looking incantations that can be extremely useful at describing patterns in text. Used all over the place, primarily in Unix tools like grep and vim, and in programming languages like Perl and PHP.

There are two “flavors” of regular expressions, those which conform to the POSIX standard, and those compatible with perl. (the latter are known as Perl-compatible regular expressions; the library many tools link to is known as libpcre).

Also seen shorthand as regexp, or simply re.

Resources

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netcat

Netcat is, as the name suggests, cat that runs over TCP/IP. It’s one of those Unix commands that deserves a more prominent place in my toolbox, like, a place in my toolbox. Must. Learn. More.

Resources

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