Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

IBM has a nice article called UNIX productivity tips. The article mentions this one-liner, which shows the shell commands you use most often:

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
    471 sl
    222 cd
    217 csl
    155 vi
    140 ..
    112 ls
    106 cls
     70 rm
     64 mv
     58 xpdf

Gee, I didn't know I'm that boring...

Note how I mistype "ls" way more often than I type it correctly. Luckily my .bashrc fixes this for me :)

Update 2006-09-25: When I posted this, I didn't intend to start a meme, but it seems I did: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32

(via Lifehacker)

Over the next few days or weeks I intend to install quite a bunch of free (as in beer) operating systems on one of my machines.

This has several reasons and benefits:

• I want to get an overview of most popular OSes out there and hands-on experiences on how to install them and partly also how to administer and use them.
• As I intend to not delete the OSes after the install, I'll have a massive-multi-boot system (>= 10 OSes) in the end. Managing to get this alone working might prove to be not exactly trivial... but definately interesting.
• Recently I started a disussion on the debian-devel mailing list about which system users on a Debian system should get a valid shell (/bin/sh, for example) and which should only get something like /bin/false [1]. While I install all these OSes, I will create a comparison chart of which users have a valid shell and which don't on every other Unix-like OS I install. This will be quite interesting, I guess, and it might help others package maintainers to decide whether or not to give certain system users a valid shell.
• It's a lot of fun :)

On the list I plan to install are most major (free) Unix-like operating systems, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora Core, OpenSuSE, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, PC-BSD, OpenSolaris, and whatever else I can find out there. Basically, if I can download a CD image for free off the net, it's fine.

I'll be writing one small blog article per OS, stating my experiences, gotchas, pros and cons I noticed etc. If you have any suggestions for OSes or distributions I should look at, or ideas about other aspects of the OSes I could compare, please leave a comment.

[1] It has been pointed out that /usr/sbin/nologin or something similar is probably better than /bin/false, because it logs login attempts at these accounts (/bin/false doesn't).

Update: Articles published so far:

• Part 5: Mandriva
• Part 4: Ubuntu
• Part 3: PC-BSD
• Part 2: SUSE Linux
• Part 1: Debian stable + unstable

It seems Apple is having more and more severe problems lately, MacOS viruses and worms start popping up and spreading on a larger scale... Michael Lehn has now discovered that Apple Safari can be tricked into automatically downloading and executing arbitrary shell scripts.

No need to mention what harm this can cause, especially if you are stupid enough to browse the web as root (or whatever Apple calls their superuser).

The behaviour to automatically open downloaded "trusted" files in a respective application is the default in Safari, which is obviously not the brightest idea Apple ever had. This is not an Apple-only problem, though. I really wonder why so many people, be it developers or users, are willing to sacrifice security for some crappy "feature"...

(via Digg)

The War on Terror — As viewed from the Bourne shell. No comment.