*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

It is slowly becoming the classic argument among Unix web developers. Which language is better, Perl or PHP? Having touched way more PHP code than Perl code, I am of course biased. However today I spoke with a die hard advocate of Perl today and he spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to me how fast Perl was, how it could connect to different databases, mod this, mod that, yada yada yada. After hanging up he sent me about 10 different examples of how PHP cannot do the things Perl can do. One of the ones he sent was….

Miester sent us a cool site for all of you Linux fans, The Linux Progress Patch.

One of our readers sent us this story posted on Yahoo which covers the pre-release of the 2.4 kernel for Linux. Linus Torvalds states in the release that he isn’t projecting the 2.4 official release however we have to note this is the 4th time rumors of the official release have been spread.This isn’t a bad thing that it is taking this long. I think most of the Linux community will agree that we don’t want the new kernel unless it is stable and very well debugged. I have been playing with 2.4test<1-10> for awhile now and it is only getting better. If there is one wish I had this New Years it is that whoever comes up with these hardware standards would put it into a Linux kernel before the product is released. I know it is wishful thinking but surely we could have standards for the standards…?

In UNIX environment, the following combination of perl and find will serch for a particular file and replace the occurence of a particular string with another string in that file. This will also work for multiple files and directories. The find command finds the file and the perl script replaces old string with the new one. perl -pi -e 's/old string/new string' `find . -name "file name"`

If you are like me, sometimes you need to actually print a man page for a certain command. Linux has a lot of built in documentation but sometimes it can be a little hard to get at. Use the following command to print out an online man page.

cd /usr/share/man/ and run zcat man.1.gz | groff -mandoc – > man.ps
lpr man.ps

Be sure that you have the package named “groff” installed. The location of your actuall man pages may be different as well. The above path is normally used in Debian Linux.

Updated 10/11/00

The following update was sent in by Steve Limkemann
“……a slightly easier, and more portable, way to print man pages is to use the command “man -t someManPage | lpr” without the quotes.”