DLSLUG 1-March-2007: Bill Stearns on "50 Ways to Run Your Programs"

[Ted Roche]

Fourteen attendees managed to find the monthly meeting of the  
Dartmouth - Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, despite being held one  
floor up from the regular meeting room. (A reminder from yours truly  
that you can save yourself a trip down and up the stairs if you just  
Read The Fine Announcement Bill McGonigle prepares each month. I  
needed the exercise anyway.)

Bill Stearns presented "50 Ways to Run Your Programs," He had  
tremendous handouts: a vinyl 3-ring notebook binder with 61 pages. He  
asked us all to skim the materials and pick out the couple of  
techniques we wanted to drill down into. He covered in some depth  
(though each could get its own book): passing commands through ssh,  
combining screen with ssh, using wget as part of a pipe, how wget can  
work with caching, using tee to redirect output through the pipe as  
well as to a file simultaneously, the precedence of && in sequencing  
commands on the command line, some of the implications of subshells  
and environment variables, gotchas with cron, using eval and netcat.  
Bill is knowledgeable and rolled well with the punches, like his new  
HP widescreen battleship of a laptop refusing to run X on the  
projector. (Bill had an aside about the joys of Open Source providing  
the means of fixing some bad interrupt logic in the BIOs with a  
kernel switch - yay, Open Source!) Bill hardly broke a sweat despite  
the attendance of Professor McIlroy, who is credited with having  
invented the pipes and filters architecture of Unix. A good time was  
had by all, with lots of time for questions (from novices "What does  
that do?" to some pretty advanced questions on piping and subshells  
and so forth.)

Next meeting is 5 April when Todd Underwood will present ZFS.

Thanks to Bill McGonigle for organizing the meeting, Bill Stearns for  
the great presentation, and all for participating.

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com