Archive for January, 2005

OpenSolaris has born

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

Sun Microsystems announced that the source code for Solaris 10 will be available as Open Source. From their website:

January 25, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that the source code for Solaris 10 - the most advanced operating system in the industry - will be made available under the OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The company has established a community Web site at opensolaris.org. Buildable source code for Solaris will be available at this site in the second quarter of 2005.

More info can be found in the press release and in opensolaris.org.

On the other hand Gentoo announced plans to add OpenSolaris support to Portage, being Portaris project a key component.

Posted in General, Solaris | No Comments »

An alternative to etc-update: dispatch-conf

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

When you emerge a new package, etc-update will check if there are updates to the configuration files and will allow you to keep, merge or delete these files according to your needs.

Portage provides us with another useful tool with more functionalities: dispatch-conf.

dispatch-conf has the same goal than etc-update: manage the configuration files after merging, but provides new useful features:

  • Ability to rollback changes
  • Automerge files
  • Versioning (rcs/cvs)
  • Log changes

More info:

Posted in Linux Gentoo | No Comments »

man pages to .ps (postscript)

Sunday, January 9th, 2005

The man command formats and displays Unix manual pages. It has the ability to format the manual pages and send them to the standard output. From manual pages:

-t Use /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout. The output from /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c may need to be passed through some filter or another before being printed.

So simply type…

man -t man_page_name > man_page_name.ps

… and it will create a postscript formatted file containing the man page. You could then convert it to PDF or whatever you want.

See also:

  • man ps2pdf
  • man psresize

Posted in Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

/bin/rm: Argument list too long

Friday, January 7th, 2005

My antispam system is configured to classify incoming messages and copy them to a particular sub-directory. As time pass more a more messages are accumulated in this folder. Recently I tried to eliminate old messages and I found myself with this:

/bin/rm: Argument list too long

And then I took a look at the directory and saw something like this:

ls -al | wc -l
58259

It seems that the rm command can’t deal with such number of arguments. Fortunately there are some workarounds for this problem.

ls | xargs rm

Or you can combine rm with find:

find . | xargs rm

Posted in Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »