Linux / Unix : Disk usage and identifying biggest files

January 17th, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

When working as a systems administrator, you’ll always end up having to solve a file system full error in a hurry. Here are a few commands and hints to help you get out of it quickly on a UNIX like system.
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Monitoring batches in IT environment : efficiently using emails

January 9th, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

Sometimes automatically running scripts in production environments are simply monitored by emails. Those scripts may run on schedule or be triggered by events and they send an email (for example to the technical support level 1) upon completion of the job. The content of the email will then give information about the outcome of the execution of the script.

This posts lists a few ideas that you might find useful to implement when in such an environment.

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Firefox (Linux) : “Middle-click on page loads URL” annoyance

January 3rd, 2010 by Stephane Kattoor

Firefox will load whatever URL is in the copy-paste buffer in the page if you middle click somewhere on a page. My mouse’s wheel also serves as the middle button, and I found it really annoying that when occasionally middle-clicking while scrolling the page, Firefox would try to load another page …

You can control this behaviour with this about:config property middlemouse.contentLoadURL. Set to true, the middle-click on the page will load the URL (if it is one) in the page, set to false it won’t.

Thanks Ayman !

Perl : Using the Finance::Quote module to get your stock prices

December 30th, 2009 by Stephane Kattoor

Finance::Quote is a Perl module which can be used to obtain stock information from various internet sources. I thought I’d rather share this code snippet as an example showing how easy it is to use, before I turn it into a bloatware with an SQL backend to compute average price per share and what not :-)

So here is a simple snippet demonstrating how to get the price of a stock :
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Gentoo Linux / Portage : How to know which package provided an installed file

December 3rd, 2009 by Stephane Kattoor

If there’s a file installed on your disk for which you’d like to know what package provided it, you can use the equery command like below :
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