Blogs of the Giant Dorks

Some of my systems are logging this error:

su: pam_env(su:session): Unable to open env file: /etc/default/locale: No such file or directory

I alr… more

Let's say we've got:

$ cat file.txt

blah blah blah append after me blah bleh! append after me blah blah blah bleeeh

This will add "new… more

This is similar to my little shell one liner to verify tar archives. Exit status of 0 means the archive is good, anything else means there's a problem. Mos… more

Let me preface this post with a rant. In retrospect, I feel that getting this netbook with the Poulsbo chipset / Intel GMA500 video was a mistake since it'… more

The following config will reject a message when more than 10 recipients are in the TO: and/or CC: fields.

/etc/postfix/main.cf:

# restrict based on… more

Needed a script for work to recursively spider one of our sites to check for problems and build a content inventory. As a side project, produced a little s… more

The goal is to download pdf files from http://example.com/dir1/dir2/, where dir1 name is constant, but dir2 is a number between 100 and 499 (e.g. http://ex… more

Let's say you run a front end system like a reverse proxy, load balancer or http accelerator (e.g. big-ip, squid, pound, varnish, apache, nginx, etc), whic… more

Was trying to figure out how to insert line numbers into a huge file with sed or awk, then stumbled across "nl", a sweet little baby that comes with GNU co… more

Got a csv file created with Open Office from a Microsoft Excel file. It contains characters which in less show up as "^K" (caret upper case K), which trip… more

BASH script to enumerate titles and chapters of a dvd and rip the longest one into avi using mencoder. DVD device can be a path to mounted iso (e.g. /mnt/i… more

I've always used telnet for SMTP testing. Finally, got sick of copy/pasting and decided to write a quick script. But scripting telnet is a pain. Netcat to… more

I've got a script that loops through a list of directory names and compresses them. There are lots and once in a while I want to check on the progress and… more

Was looking for a way to purge Varnish cache when pages are updated or added. WordPress Varnish plugin looks exactly like what I'm after, except it threw u… more

I'm considering implementing Varnish at Stanford Law and have been playing with it here to understand implications and workout issues. One issue is purging… more