Blogs / Personal blogs

Evan Klitzke

eklitzke.org

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Visit eklitzke.org → On Hacker News Nov 2016 – Oct 2022

Software Engineering 6Tools & Productivity 4Systems & Performance 4Security & Privacy 1Math & Algorithms 1Programming Languages 1

1

Bash $* and $@ (2017)

In Bash, there are two closely related "special parameters" for accessing how the current script was invoked: $* and $@ . For both variables, the behavior is affected by whether or not the variable is enclosed in double quotes. The following table summarizes all cases:

2

The cult of dd (2017)

You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century.

4

Lobotomizing Gnome

I have pretty basic needs from my desktop. I do 99% of my work using just three programs: a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox. I don't want a lot of bells and whistles in my desktop, and I really just want it to get out of the way so I can do my work.