Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Luke Smith" channel.

  1. Aka the “Super Mario” approach to scripting ... Well, he was a plumber, wasn’t he?
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  2. 1:31 pdfinfo (part of the poppler-utils package) will show info about PDF files such as titles. But these don’t always match the text you see on the title page of the document.
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  3. “helps your scripts to be more readable” sounds like those people who write “if (cond == true)” in languages where the condition is only allowed to be of boolean type anyway.
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  4. 11:03 “Computers that last” ... now that’s not something that was commonly heard up to, say, 15 years ago. But now that performance has hit a plateau, maybe longer-term thinking will become more fashionable ...
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  5. It was invented by Tony Hoare. What was remarkable was that it could be implemented with essentially zero run-time overhead. Hoare was also one of the proponents of “structured programming”. Which I feel is underrated these days, where I see C code especially using gotos like they’re going out of fashion.
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  6. The nice thing about systemd is that it means user files are kept in the user area, instead of being in /var/spool/cron. Much tidier.
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  7. 5:01 That “du” command looks like an expensive way to find subdirectories.
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  8. 0:23 Should really make that “ls -A”.
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  9. 3:48 Spider is thinking “I swear that’s the same guy who tore it down yesterday. I don’t know why he keeps walking there.”
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  10. 5:05 Can you not use uparrow to bring back previous items in the command history? You can in Emacs.
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  11.  @heldereduardopintosousavid7474  If MacOS is “real UNIX”, we’ll stick to Linux.
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  12. 2:48 Why is your personal scripts folder hidden (having a name beginning with a dot)?
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  13. 2:17 I defined a custom “make-shell-buffer” command in my Emacs prefs https://github.com/ldo/emacs-prefs which gives me an interactive window where I can execute arbitrary shell commands and get back their output as editable text in the buffer.
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  14. 0:36 The Linux kernel is a “single point of failure” for your entire system. Should you stop using Linux?
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  15. Emacs isn’t just a text editor, it’s an editor . I have successfully used it to directly edit binary files. Emacs is not an IDE. IDEs require you to use particular build systems, and sometimes even particular version-control systems. Emacs will happily work with any build system, and any version-control system. Emacs is infinitely customizable. Most editors have commands to let you jump between matching bracket symbols (e.g. between “{” and the matching ”}”). Does your editor let you jump between matching indentation levels? (E.g. in my Python code I close an “if” with a line containing a correspondingly-indented “#end if” comment). Emacs didn’t, until I added commands to make it do so.
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  16. 2:15 And the irony is, the IME runs its own OS based on MINIX, which is Open-Source!
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  17. 1:11 It’s actually unnecessary to use the PulseAudio-specific commands, if you want a script that works both ways. The Alsa amixer command still works under PulseAudio.
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  18. Like I said, my condolences.
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  19. Do you get the feeling that Bash syntax has, shall we say, evolved by accretion over time? ;)
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  20. Who said any of them are bad? Only you did.
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  21. Fine. If you find a system made only out of small, single-function pieces, by all means stick to it. While the entire rest of the computing world continues to embrace Linux.
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  22. 0:56 Just a note that bashrc is only automatically invoked by non-login shells, so it’s either-or: either the new shell will run the profile, or the rc, not both. I find this annoying, so the best thing perhaps is to have the profile do little or nothing apart from automatically sourcing the rc, so you get the same definitions available either way.
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  23. 5:44 Emacs is able to use those keys without your having to disable their special tty meaning. I think it uses something called “raw” mode. Perhaps the vi developers should learn about this?
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  24. 14:33 The trouble with that technique is that it returns true even if the pulseaudio server is running for a different user.
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  25. 1:01 TOO LATE! Gentoo now does systemd!
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  26. 0:34 Is systemd monolithic? Or is it made up of pieces you can choose to use or not? Let us hear from someone who has actually used it...
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  27. Only if you ignore languages which let you say “n = n + 1” ...
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  28. 5:17 So now instead of dotfile clutter, you have environment clutter instead.
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  29. 6:08 zsh is the default shell in SystemRescueCD, and I discovered that it has one irritating habit: stripping off the trailing ”/” from a directory name after you have typed it. This causes problems when trying to do an rsync, since the behaviour is slightly different depending on whether the source directory ends with a “/” or not.
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  30. This was running straight off the SystemRescueCD image, so I couldn’t have set any options if I wanted to.
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  31. On Linux you can have a compose key which works across apps, whether Emacs or Vim or LibreOffice or Firefox or whatever. http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/ComposeKey On Emacs you have an additional feature, CTRL-X-8-RET, which lets you enter the Unicode name. Or you can enter just part of the name, and it will bring up a list of likely candidates you can choose from.
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  32. No, in the shell, an exit status of 0 is read as “true” and nonzero as “false”. This is because 0 normally denotes success and nonzero indicates failure of some kind.
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  33. The whole cron concept is showing its age.
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  34. systemd is much more versatile. And it puts user files in the user area, instead of in /var somewhere.
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  35. That hoary old “do one thing, and do it well” was always a half-truth. It never applied to the Linux kernel itself, or to the X server, or even to glibc. Have you looked at bash? Did you notice its man page alone is over 5000 lines? In order for the small pieces to work well together, the big pieces are essential.
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  36. systemd is just as modular as the Linux kernel. bash is not modular. And you admit that the X server and glibc are large monoliths. So why do you pick on systemd?
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  37. 7:55 Emacs has built-in online help, available from CTRL-H. For example, CTRL-H followed by A is “apropos”, where you can find relevant functions by keyword, CTRL-H C lets you get information about key bindings, etc.
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  38. It’s only about a 40kB executable on AMD64. Feel free to offer us a more efficient version, along with benchmarks showing why your version is better.
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  39. Not necessarily accurate -- see my comment on pdfinfo.
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  40. Instead of echo «something» | «cmd» how about «cmd» <<EOD «something» EOD (should work with any POSIX-compliant shell), or «cmd» <<<«something» (bash-specific).
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  41. I haven’t bothered with SpamAssassin. The one thing that keeps 95% of the spam away is greylisting. So I run sqlgrey.
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  42. 6:35 You realize that continual polling of the volume setting is quite unnecessary? For example, on KDE, I get D-Bus signals broadcast to all listeners on the per-user session bus to notify them of useful things like volume changes. So interested processes can simply listen for the relevant signals.
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  43. Which Linux-compatible systems don’t have /bin/bash?
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  44.  @brlin  Would /usr/bin/env bash work there?
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  45. I have no idea what you mean. I have used if-constructs in every single programming language I have ever become proficient in, and that includes Bash.
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  46. Tell your profs that ODF is an official ISO standard, ISO 26300.
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  47.  @bradleyhove4177  LibreOffice can do that.
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  48.  @bradleyhove4177  Service not up to scratch? Demand your money back.
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  49. Luke 12:47 And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.
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  50.  @ej_sykes  Not on Debian-based systems any more, which is most of them.
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  51. A command line can be automated, a GUI cannot. A GUI is designed for humans to use, but that also means that humans are forced to perform all the necessary actions in a GUI -- methods to automate GUI actions has been tried (mouse/keyboard macros), but they tend to be fiddly and unreliable. Whereas it is easy to package command sequences in a script, to make it easy to execute them repeatedly with minimal work. Case in point: the whole concept of cut/copy/paste originated in GUI apps, yet while you can copy/paste command-line sequences in terminal windows, you cannot copy/paste GUI action sequences. Ironic or not?
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  52. Is it just coincidence that last night I saw that Family Guy episode where Lois goes all Marie Kondo and ends up evicting her entire family?
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  53. That old Unix half-truth “do one thing and do it well” would never work without all the large pieces on which to build the small ones: the kernel, the shell, glibc, gcc, the X server, systemd and so on.
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  54. And here I thought VIM lost to MAPI decades ago ... https://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/how_mapi_beat_v.html
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  55. The key problem with this kind of tool is there is no Unix/POSIX standard for notification of filesystem events. Linux has its own inotify and fanotify systems, other OSes have different ones or none at all, forcing you to resort to periodic polling to notice changes.
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  56. 0:37 Says “like totally” with a book titled “Medieval Grammar & Rhetoric” literally at his elbow ...
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  57. Not necessarily accurate -- see my comment on pdfinfo.
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  58. To avoid appending the default domain.
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  59. “On top of the operating system is the rest of the system software. Here we find the command interpreter (shell), window systems, compilers, editors, and similar application-independent programs. It is important to realize that these programs are definitely not part of the operating system, even though they are typically supplied preinstalled by the computer manufacturer, or in a package with the operating system if it is installed after purchase. This is a crucial, but subtle, point. The operating system is (usually) that portion of the software that runs in kernel mode or supervisor mode. It is protected from user tampering by the hardware ...” -- Tanenbaum & Woodhull, “Operating Systems Design And Implementation”, third edition, page 3 That is the well-known “MINIX Book”, by the way. So you see, by that definition, Linux is very definitely an ”operating system”.
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  60. (cd ~/projects/myproject; git diff master mybranch) | patch -p1
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  61. AppleScript ... my condolences. (I used to be a fan of it back in the 1990s.)
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  62. After doing it for some years, I came to the conclusion that trying to script GUI apps is a waste of time. The Linux approach is to provide the command-line functionality, then put the GUI as a separate layer on top of that. If you want to automate functions, you skip the GUI and do it at the command line. Much more efficient and reliable, with much less stuffing around.
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  63. Most of the ones on Linux are.
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  64. 1:00 PulseAudio bloat?!? But, but it’s in Slackware now!
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  65. This is why having separate command and insert modes is a bad idea.
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  66. In a command language, everything is assumed to be a literal string unless some special characters indicate otherwise. In a programming language (in which I include Python, Go etc), everything is an expression or statement unless you use special quotes to indicate literal strings. The latter is a pain in a command language. That’s why they’re not designed that way. And that’s why programming languages tend not to be good as command languages.
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  67. Any equivalent to “apropos”?
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  68. Or at least backslashism.
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  69. How do you do the equivalent of ffprobe?
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  70. 14:01 Don’t do it that way. The more reliable way would be to use a client tool like pactl, ignore the output, and see if it succeeds (PulseAudio is running) or not, e.g. pactl info &>/dev/null && echo yes || echo no outputs “yes” if PulseAudio is running, “no” if not.
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  71. Sure http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/your_wget_is_broken_and_should_die_powershellers_tell_microsoft/ ...
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