Bruce Ediger

11,297 reputation

923

bio	website	stratigery.com
	location	Denver, CO
	age	52
visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
	seen	1 hour ago
stats	profile views	319

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer 3 - 6809-based, running OS-9 Level II. It could run 32 processes at once, due to bank-switching a whole 1 Meg of memory.

After that, I got an AT&T 3b2, also known as a Convergent Safari. This was a Motorola 68010-based desktop.

Then, I graduated to a NeXT black&white "slab". I bought a used SPARCStation IPC in 1995, and put NetBSD 0.9 on it.

I've been using Linux since 1997, starting with a DEC Alpha-based UDB, and downgrading to a x86 PC in 2002.

I run Slackware and Arch linux.

	11,297 reputation	bio	website	stratigery.com	visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
923 badges		location	Denver, CO		seen	1 hour ago

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May 20	answered	How would you code a Linux system installer?
May 20	answered	How to copy text to xterm
May 19	comment	What is the “directory order” of files in a directory (used by `ls -U`)? A directory in filesystems like ext2, or BSD FFS or the original Unix filesystem, just contained a list of inode numbers and corresponding file names. Invoking "ls" without arguments just earned you a list of file names. If you did "ls -l", "ls" itself would look up every file name by doing a stat(2) system call on the file name, and from the struct stat, get permissions, size, "file type", etc. So, no, a directory file doesn't have all the information, just a list of names.
May 19	revised	What is the “directory order” of files in a directory (used by `ls -U`)? Add a link to some supporting documentation.
May 19	comment	What is the “directory order” of files in a directory (used by `ls -U`)? Traditionally, something very much like struct dirent, which I find defined in /usr/include/bits/dirent.h on a RHEL box, and on a Slackware 11.0 box. Both of those machines refuse to open() a directory directly. I know that I used to do things like "cat . > dot.as.file" to convert a directory to a regular file, the last time I did it for sure was Solaris 8, I think. Basically, struct dirent contains an inode (a number), a record length, a name length, and a string, which as I recall, may or may not be ASCII-Nul terminated.
May 19	comment	Find files with same name but different extensions, send to tgz OK, that comment isn't helpful. You need to take care when thinking of Linux and Unix filenames: they do not have "extensions" except by convention. That is, "file.nef" and "file.xmp" have different filenames. The ".nef" and ".xmp" are parts of the filenames, not separate fields kept apart from the file name proper, like in FAT filesystems, or ODS-11.
May 19	comment	Find files with same name but different extensions, send to tgz You need to take care when thinking of Linux and Unix filenames: they do not have "extensions" except by convention.
May 19	answered	What is the “directory order” of files in a directory (used by `ls -U`)?
May 16	comment	nmap output: what does “uptime” mean? For another data point that shows "uptime", take a look at Michal Zalewski's p0f (lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f.shtml). It's a passive scanner that takes relatively good guesses at the OS that generated various TCP connections. It includes "uptime" when it finds a Linux-generated SYN packet.
May 10	revised	Cursor movement in terminals added 142 characters in body
May 10	answered	Port monitoring on GNU/Linux based NAT router
May 10	answered	Cursor movement in terminals
May 10	comment	join : “File 2 not in sorted order” Can you give us the output of "join --version" and "sort --version" just for completeness sake? I can't get some older versions of gnu join to give me that error message under any circumstance.
May 5	answered	How to install a shared library in Linux
May 5	comment	Alternatives to FVWM window manager? "Dying a slow death", long times between new versions, these may just be symptoms of mature software that has most/all features that it's philosophy supports, and that has been debugged. Andy Ozment takes a look at OpenBSD in "Milk or Wine" (andyozment.com/papers/…) and suggests that software does become less buggy as time goes on. Stay with FVWM if it meets your needs.
May 3	answered	Running C Programs on Linux
Apr 19	answered	Strange encoding in Slackware
Apr 19	comment	how much space to reserve on ext3 filesystem to prevent fragmentation issues? But let's be clear: ext3 fragmentation isn't at all the same as NTFS fragmentation. ext3 allocates disk blocks to files as individual blocks. NTFS allocates disk blocks in extents. A "fragmented" NTFS file can have multiple inode-equivalents full of very small extents of disk blocks.
Apr 15	comment	Collapse repeating characters The "squeeze" (-s) option to tr can be used on a range of characters, too: echo "aabbcc" \| tr -s '[ac]' should yeild "abbc"
Apr 13	comment	What potential ills can be brought by 'deleting' a live kernel? I don't think that "the kernel does not page" is true universally. support.microsoft.com/kb/184419 seems to imply that "drivers and system code in the Windows NT Executive" can be pageable. There's also references to VMS and Tenex operating system having pageable kernel code, or perhaps just stack and data.