Tips, Wisdom, and Advocacy...

Shells (zsh)

• alias ll="ls -al" pretty standard for long listing
• alias new="ll -rt" show most recently changed files at the bottom
• alias nemesis="lpr -Pnemesis" for quicker printing (i.e. cat file.txt | nemesis for a printer named nemesis.)
• alias more=less in case you forget.
• alias sc="ls *.[ch] | xargs egrep" search all .c and .h files in current dir for a given expression.

The shell I normally use is zsh and i HIGHLY recommend it, it is free and very powerful.. these next few things only work in zsh. there are a whole slew of options in zsh perhaps the most useful one I find is AUTO_CD you turn it on with setopt autocd (this can be placed in your .zshrc) with that turned on you can switch directories just by typing the dir name as if it were a program. ie you can type .. or /home and go there instantly. I know it only saves 3 keystrokes but they add up.. see the zsh man pages for more autocommands. Another zshism dealing with directories is cd - which will switch to the directory you were just in, this is just one of the most useful features. unlike pushd/popd it is always on. useful whenever you need to switch to another dir for just a sec to make a change.

=executable (ie. =ls, =perl or =texi2html) expands to `which executable` (those are backquotes) this is perhaps the most common use of backquotes and a great shortcut for it. useful for ls -al =perl (see the permissions on perl without checking if it is /usr/bin or /bin or wherever first) or something like less =texi2html to view the texi2html script

The last useful zshism i will mention is the **/* notation which expands recursivly to all files and directorys that can be reached under the current dir. as in ls **/*.c will find every c file in the current dir and all its subdirectories and all the subdirectories and so forth. grep whereami **/* will search for whereami in all files from the current dir onward.

Color

GNU ls can colorize your directory listings depending on what type of file is being displayed, its permissons or various other criteria. to enable this feature use the --color=tty option to ls. if you wish to always have it enabled, add this to your shells startup script alias ls="ls --color=tty" or alias ls="ls -F --color=tty" if you want a special character appended to the file to also let you know what type of file it is.

another place that color can be used effectivly is in your email. Are you using pine or elm or mh? i strongly suggest trying out mutt. mutt can do most anything and will colorize your mail deal with MIME properly and thread your mailbox which means it will groug messages and their replys together. see the mutt homepage for more.

many text editors will also be able to color code what you are editing. vim the editor i use (see my editor section) can color syntax hightlight just about anything you could concievably want to hightlight. just add :syntax on to your .vimrc (you need at least vim 5.0 for this)

Editor (vim)

• .(period) repeats your last change ie, use cw to change a word to something else, . will repeat whereever you are
• <C-a> control-A will add 1 to the nearest number. it even understands hex. very useful in coding
• :%s/foo/bar/g replace all foo's with bar's.
• :syntax on turn on syntax highlighting in vim >= 5.0
• shift-v and control-v visual mode a vimism that lets you grab big chunks of text at once. use standard commands on the blck like y to yank c to chang etc. control-v will do an actual rectangular block useful at times
• =% = will auto indent your code % will match {([ with their mates.. so to autoindent main place the cursor on { and press =%.

Books

The undisputed king of practical unix knowledge in books is by far O'Reilly and Assosiates. basically, if you need a book on something and they have one on what you want you cannot go wrong. their books typically have an animal on the cover but recently they have been straying from the formula.

For hard therory Springer-Verlag is always a good bet. they also produce the "Yellow books" of mathematical fame, their CS books will often be grey but sometimes not if they are very theoretical and classifed more in the math section.

some other Excelent books i have and would very highly recommend if you are at all interested in the field are:

• Unix Network Programming Volume 1 Second edition: networking APIs, Stevens this is the most excelent book on network programming and sockets. be sure to get the second edition though as the first is quite dated. Stevens pretty much rocks at any book he writes.
• Advaced Programming in the UNIX envirornment, Stevens also by stevens and excellent, full of how to program everything UNIX/Posix.
• The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, McKuSick Bostic Karels and Quarterman red with a devil on it. much better than the previous edition, really a great book an a specific case of OS design.
• Distributed Operating Systems, Tanunbaum Tanunbaum is classic the author of Minix with his new distributed OS. top notch.
• What Computing is all about, van de Snepscheut more theoretical but all sorts of very cool stuff describes reversible computing and a theoretiacl maching composed of billiard balls, also the author (Jan van de Snepscheut) taught here at Caltech until he went insane and attemted to kill his family with an Axe and then burnt down his house with him inside. thats gotta say something for the book.
• UNIX Internals: the new frontiers, Vahalia this book is the bomb. it has all sorts of cutting edge awesome technologies such as logging filesystems, microkernel based systems and a good comparasin of how UNIXs are different on a fundamental level, a must if your interested in whats inside a modern UNIX

Philosophy