Tips on Unix utilities and related topics from @JohnDCook.
Joined August 2011
- Tweets 6,298
- Following 19
- Followers 83,123
- Likes 98
201 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
22 May 2015
'The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.' -- Donald E. Knuth
12
337
621
Was reading up on dc and a source said one of its advantages is its use in obfuscated code competitions.
If a language is good for writing obfuscated code, maybe that’s a bad sign.
2
13
3,467
Unix tool tip retweeted
Jun 9
I talked to a man yesterday who has 5 virtual assistants.
I only have two: Python and Bash.
I used to have a virtual assistant named Perl but I had to let her go. I got along with her OK but not the rest of my staff.
2
2
49
3,392
Jun 10
You can look for files between a pair of dates using -newermt twice: files with newer modification time than one date and not newer than another date.
find . -type f -name "*.tex" -newermt "2025-03-01" ! -newermt "2025-06-01"
Note the command has a bang, not a pipe.
1
1
16
1,822
Ultimate collection of Emacs resources: batsov.com/articles/2011/11/…
1
1
17
1,862
10 patterns in modern Linux tools that trace back to ed(1)
johndcook.com/blog/2026/06/0…
1
3
19
2,745
Gnu sed allows addresses of the form start~step. For example, 1~2 matches odd-numbered lines.
1
10
1,586
Useful Perl one-liners catonmat.net/download/perl1l… by @pkrumins
11
1,715
Latest edition to my Emacs config file:
;; Toggle frame maximization
(when (display-graphic-p)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'toggle-frame-maximized))
1
14
2,588
delete from line 3 up to and including first blank line: sed 3,/^$/d filename
8
1,741
May 28
The option -w or --ignore-all-space tells diff to ignore spaces in one line even where the corresponding line has none.
1
11
1,725
May 25
What's one Linux command you wish you'd learned years ago? reddit.com/r/linux/comments/…
5
3
19
5,736