The Command Line Utility “jot”
My good friend Kenny Chiou, a physical anthropology graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, sent me a handy script he wrote to generate a series of number in R after seeing my previous...
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YouTube: Video of Unix Tips and Tricks
A few summers ago, I was teaching a programming course to high school students with the Harlem Children Society (written up by WNYC in this article). Since Unix was so foundational to the lessons that...
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“tar” is Derived from Tape Archive
I empathized with the stick figures in this recent XKCD comic: That’s why I have the following pasted next to my monitor: and this in my ~/.bash_profile: function extract() # Handy Extract Program. {...
View ArticleProcess Substitution
The Molecular Ecologist blog pointed me to Vince Buffalo’s post on named pipes and process substitution, which should be in the arsenal of any Unix hacker. Both allow you to avoid creating temporary...
View ArticleForcibly Delete the Universe
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. When I was teaching a high school programming course, it took me awhile to gather up the courage to even type the following on a chalkboard: rm -rf / For...
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Stuff I Routinely Forget How to Do
A surprisingly important hunk of my bioinformatic skill set consists of Googling for error messages and implementing whatever fix the, say, StackOverflow posters suggested. I’ve collected the wisdom...
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