Subject
11 entries
Unix
Bookmarks
Shell history as a long-term command archive
Thorsten Ball's post on making shell history permanent, large, and searchable — the case for treating your command history as a personal knowledge archive. Practical config that unlocks years of reproducible workflow context.
yabai on macOS: Proof That macOS Can Look Good
A Reddit r/unixporn showcase of a yabai + skhd setup on macOS, demonstrating that macOS can match the aesthetic and workflow density of Linux tiling window managers. Good reference for the kind of setup possible with yabai.
Random Sampling from Very Large Files
Practical techniques for taking random samples from large files without loading them into memory — covering Unix tools (shuf, awk) and reservoir sampling. Essential for working with data too large for pandas to read in one shot.
crush-tools: Custom Reporting Utilities for Shell
crush-tools is a Google-hosted collection of Unix command-line utilities extending the standard toolkit for custom reporting — field manipulation, aggregation, and transformation on tab-delimited files. Purpose-built for the kind of ad hoc data work that awk handles awkwardly.
Ad Hoc Data Analysis From the Unix Command Line
Wikibooks guide to ad hoc data analysis using Unix command-line tools — awk, sed, sort, uniq, cut, and friends. A practical reference for doing quick data exploration without loading a language or framework.
Solving Google Treasure Hunt Puzzle 4: Prime Numbers
Peteris Krumins' solution to Google Treasure Hunt Puzzle 4 — find the smallest prime expressible as the sum of 7, 17, 41, and 541 consecutive primes simultaneously — solved pragmatically by downloading a pre-computed prime dataset and using Unix pipes instead of writing a sieve.
Set Operations in the Unix Shell
Peteris Krumin's catonmat guide to implementing set operations (union, intersection, difference, complement) using Unix command-line tools. A concise demonstration that shell pipelines can express set algebra without any code.
Five Text Processing Tools You Should Know
Symkat's guide to five Unix text processing tools beyond the basics — covering less-known utilities that handle common data munging tasks more cleanly than awk/sed alone. Practical shell tooling for anyone working with text data on the command line.
Don't MAWK AWK – the Fastest and Most Elegant Big Data Munging Language
Brendan O'Connor's defense of AWK as a fast, elegant big data munging language — arguing it beats Python for many common structured text processing tasks. A counterpoint to the idea that awk is an obsolete curiosity.
ZSH-LOVERS — The Zsh Reference
ZSH-LOVERS is the classic reference for Zsh tips, tricks, and advanced features — a comprehensive man-page-style document covering everything from globbing to completion to prompt customization. The go-to resource for developers moving from bash to zsh.
Unix Shell Tricks
Carles Fenoy's collection of Unix/Linux shell tricks and one-liners — a plain-text reference of practical command-line techniques. The kind of document that circulated among sysadmins and developers via bookmarks before Stack Overflow consolidated this knowledge.