Simon Willison's Weblog: unix

Reasons to use your shell's job control

2024-07-07T16:30:55+00:00

Reasons to use your shell's job control

Julia Evans summarizes an informal survey of useful things you can do with shell job control features - fg, bg, Ctrl+Z and the like. Running tcdump in the background so you can see its output merged in with calls to curl is a neat trick.

Tags: unix, julia-evans

Bugs in Hello World

2022-03-15T06:14:06+00:00

Bugs in Hello World

If a Unix program attempts to send its standard output to /dev/full it should return an error code. Many classic “hello world” programs fail to correctly handle this case.

Tags: unix

jc

2021-12-05T23:05:11+00:00

This is such a great idea: jc is a CLI tool which knows how to convert the output of dozens of different classic Unix utilities to JSON, so you can more easily process it programmatically, pipe it through jq and suchlike. “pipx install jc” to install, then “dig example.com | jc --dig” to try it out.

Via Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App

Tags: cli, json, unix, jq

How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow

2019-07-05T17:51:09+00:00

How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow

I’m already a keen user of ripgrep (a crazy-fast grep alternative) but fzf was new to me: it’s a CLI utility that lets you pipe in a list of strings, then gives you a typeahead search interface to search and select a string before returning the selected string to stdout when you hit enter. This means you can pipe it together with other tools to add a dynamic selection step, which has all kinds of delightful combinations. “vi $(find . | fzf)” for example opens vi against the file you selected.

Via Hacker News

Tags: cli, unix, ripgrep

Run the First Edition of Unix (1972) with Docker

2017-11-22T15:36:15+00:00

Run the First Edition of Unix (1972) with Docker

This is so cool... run docker run --rm -it bahamat/unix-1st-ed to drop into a simulation of a PDP-11 running genuine 1972 era Unix! If you haven't got into Docker yet, Docker for Mac is a single click install these days and works incredibly well.

Via r/docker

Tags: unix, docker

fd

2017-10-08T21:27:06+00:00

“A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.” Written in Rust, with a less confusing default command-line syntax than the regular find command. Microbenchmark shows it running 7x faster. Install it on OS X using “brew install fd”.

Via Show HN

Tags: homebrew, unix, rust

Is it important for modern programmers to know how to use Unix? Why?

2010-10-04T12:34:00+00:00

My answer to Is it important for modern programmers to know how to use Unix? Why? on Quora

I'd say yes. If you do any kind of server-side development, Linux/Unix etc UNIX (links to: /topic/Unix), etc., is where most of the exciting innovation is happening. Tools like HadoopApache Hadoop (links to: /topic/Apache-Hadoop), RedisRedis (links to: /topic/Redis), MongoDBMongoDB (links to: /topic/MongoDB), nginxnginx (links to: /topic/nginx), git etc Git (links to: /topic/Git-version-control-1), etc., all come from a Unix UNIX culture, and not knowing your way around a command line makes it much harder to get to grips with them.

Tags: programming, software-engineering, unix, quora

Running Processes

2010-03-02T09:55:18+00:00

Running Processes

I’ve been searching for a good solution to this problem (“run this program, and restart it if it falls over”) for years. I’m currently using god which works pretty well, but according to this article I should be learning upstart instead. It never ceases to amaze me how difficult this is, and how obtuse the tools are.

Tags: god, linux, processes, ubuntu, unix, upstart

The Go Programming Language

2009-11-11T07:00:21+00:00

The Go Programming Language

A brand new systems programming language, designed by Robert Griesemer and Unix/Plan 9 veterans Rob Pike and Ken Thompson and funded by Google. Concurrency is supported by lightweight communicating processes called goroutines. “It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language.”

Tags: concurrency, go, google, goroutines, ken-thompson, plan9, programming, robert-griesemer, rob-pike, unix

Python is Unix

2009-10-07T11:43:20+00:00

Python is Unix

Jacob ports Ryan Tomayko’s simple prefork network server to Python.

Tags: jacob-kaplan-moss, python, ryan-tomayko, unix

I like Unicorn because it's Unix

2009-10-07T11:42:04+00:00

I like Unicorn because it's Unix

Ryan Tomayko analyses Unicorn, a new, pre-forking Ruby HTTP server that makes extensive use of Unix syscalls and idioms, and asks why dynamic language programmers don’t take advantage of these more often.

Tags: exec, fork, programming, ruby, ryan-tomayko, unicorn, unix

shunit2

2009-09-27T19:34:03+00:00

shunit2

xUnit style testing for shell scripts.

Via Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: bash, shell, shunit2, testing, unix, xunit

Perl 6: The MAIN sub

2009-05-28T21:32:24+00:00

Perl 6: The MAIN sub

"Calling subs and running a typical Unix program from the command line is visually very similar: you can have positional, optional and named arguments." - that's exactly what I was thinking when I came up with optfunc.

Via Keith Devens

Tags: cli, optfunc, perl, perl6, python, unix