Mar 312014
 

Productivity is very important. With a boost in productivity we save time and we get more work done in short period. That is why today in factories the production lines are automated. Productivity boosting is also important in everyday computer usage. No matter if you are just an regular desktop user, power user, developer or podcaster, with a boost in productivity you can save time, get more done and even also save some disk space, CPU and RAM usage. Many people do not know that there are some excelent opensource applications for increment the productivity. Some of them come as standard GNU tools with every Linux based operating system and other are standard parts from every major Linux distribution.

Idea behind this article is to cover some softwares that will be helpful for regular desktop users and also for small companies and offices.

1. ) Linux Terminal

Linux console is very powerful and useful. Learning your way through console should be on a to do list for every user. Today most users look at console like some archaic software, but console is not dead. It is used by millions of users everyday. Administration of systems, databases, development and many more tasks can be done faster from console then from any GUI application.

You can check my article on 10 programs to be used from the terminal, to get some idea of what you can do on the command line.

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Feb 222012
 

It’s funny how through small daily tasks sometimes it happen to find new features or commands that you do not knew not, and today this thing happened to me.
In particular, I had to do something trivial on the shell of a server, run : command1 | tail-n 2 i use tail to keep, from a significant long output, only the last 2 lines which then i use in another function, but beyond this, I needed to understand if command1 was terminated with an exit code of 0 or if the code was not 0 which number it was.

A simple:

....
comando1 | tail -n 2 
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
	then
		echo "comando1 fallito."
		EXIT_CODE=1
	fi
....

Does not work because the exit code comes from the command tail, which in my case is always 0.
So I Googled a bit and found more than a solution for this simple problem.
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Dec 052010
 

terminalSometimes it happen to find in our file system files with strange names, with that i means files with non-alphanumeric characters or spaces between different words, maybe uploaded by users, or files produced by mistake by someone or some program, and unfortunately is often not trivial to do a mv < file > or rm < file >.

Let’s see how to get rid of these horrors. Continue reading »

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