Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,390 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
3277

Casually removing root files

You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…

3287

GCC Specs: An Introduction

If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…

3296

Rootless Pings in Rust

Sending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can’t create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it. The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless. I…