Terminal

Do you have a MacOs laptop? I am not an Apple fan. In fact, I have in the past, bought a Macbook Pro and returned it within the first fourteen days as I felt that what I got was not worth the price. However, as I have mentioned several times in the past in this blog, my career started on Linux and hence I do like and feel really comfortable navigating the command line. As part of my current role though, I am not coding on a daily basis but primarily helping create an environment where my engineers can be more productive every day. ...

I began my software development career on Linux. I am and have always been very comfortable with the command line and do not really care if I have to open up the command line on Windows. However, in the Windows world, command line used to suck. I think that is a polite way to put it. It truly sucked so bad that developers from a Linux background, often wondered how windows even got this far. It had a weird window size limitation and used to open only halfway through your wide screen! ...

Hey folks, So I’ve seen a lot of people open putty and then select their host and finally enter a user name and password. I don’t do that. I don’t want to either. Why would I? I’m a computer scientist/programmer/whatever. I should not do repetitive tasks. I should automate it. Password free SSH login is just that: Automation. How do you do it? This isn’t rocket science. Let us start with what SSH is Secure Shell. OMG! That didn’t help. It is a protocol that helps you to connect to remote machines securely over unsecured networks. Over use of secure you might say. You generally need an SSH server and an SSH client for this purpose. Generally most of your enterprise linux hosts would be configured to allow your personal workstation to connect to it using an SSH client like Putty. There are several different versions of this protocol too. But I’m not a networking protocol geek. So enough said. Let us go right into what you have to do to setup your computer to log in. ...

So in one of my previous posts I told you about terminal multiplexing and also mentioned how cool it was. Now is the time to introduce you to GNU Screen. The wikipedia page is a good introduction already. But I should talk about it from my point of view, about how I use it. To be honest, if I knew of the abilities of tmux at the time I got to know about screen, I would have just started using tmux. It isn’t too hard to switch though. It would just take a day or two of getting used to the new short cuts. Or you could go ahead and manually configure your shortcuts to keep you happy. ...

Hello there folks! I have been using [BASH](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29) for quite a long time. Yet I feel like there is a lot that I don’t know. The irony is that I am doing the BASH and Linux Basics training for new hires at my firm. I am not that bad, you see. It is just that there is so much to know. And I am never happy with what I know. ...