One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.

One of the features of bash I’ve too long overlooked is its history expansion. In this post I’ll show a few examples to get a grip at it.

If you need to identify broken symlinks, you can do the following :
find -L . -type l

The -L options instructs find to follow symlinks when possible. Hence no “working symlink” will ever get returned as the targets won’t match -type l (meaning “file is a symlink”).

On the other hand, find will not be able to follow broken symlinks, so the information will be taken from the symlink itself and not from the non-existent or otherwise unreachable target. The -type l will then be a match and the broken symlink filename will be returned.

I ran into this into the following article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“. This article is mainly common sense, but there are interesting points, such as :

• avoid piping when you can, in order to save performance (the classical construct grep | wc to count the lines is useless as most versions of grep can count with grep -c)
• use awk to “grep” on a specific field of a line with “… | awk ‘$1 == “XXX”‘ which is cool and I never use
• the find | xargs construct (I’d add “find -print0 | xargs -0”, useful if your find brings back filenames with a space inside …)

All in all it is worth a reading, if only to refresh your memory.