Caleb Cushing's Blog Also known as XenoTerraCide
Posts with the tag shell:

cat that displays tabs at 4 spaces

So in the tabs vs spaces war I’m squarely on the side of use tabs. tabs have meaning. tabs allow people to set there editor’s to whatever space display width their eyes are comfortable with as opposed to what yours are (e.g. you like 2 spaces I like 4). However, I’ve heard the argument what about when you cat the file, etc. Well it is actually a bit annoying… so let’s fix it.

bash and konsole

So I’ve had lots of problems using a multi-tab xterminal, for the casual user I’m sure they’d not even notice them, or think I’m silly, but when you spend all day in a shell they become less so. Historyone of the big problems I’ve had is with history. see when you close a shell then it writes the history. well if you have 5 tabs open each with with a super long history they’ll write those histories out in the order they close in.

Adding a new group to an open shell without logging in and out

Most Unix users believe it’s impossible to add a group that was recently added to your user account without logging in and logging out. If you’re running X and need to give your gui new permissions (like dolphin/konqueoror) this may be true, for the most part. I don’t know how to change it for those processes. However, if you need to change it for a shell prompt it’s easy. You merely execute the command newgrp <newgroupname> in an open shell prompt and that prompt will now be loaded with the new group.

really nice

if you are using the cfq io scheduler in linux you can use ionice to nice your io. so to really nice something you would do nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 programname. This may not be the best idea on all programs but it works. If a program is beating your hd and cpu and you don’t want it to run this when starting it.