@Ungeheuer Makefiles never tries to uninstall old versions of software. That would be unsafe, especially if that would require removing libraries that still may be in use by other programs. There is sometimes an uninstall target, but that's for uninstalling the specific version of the software that you are currently compiling.

Having another grep in /usr/local/bin should not be a problem. Just make sure that you place that directory before /usr/bin in your PATH, or that you call grep with an explicit path when you use it.

Overwriting the system's grep in /bin would potentially confuse the package manager that you are using, if it does checksumming of installed files. It may also break system software that relies on a specific version of grep.

It's unfortunate that there still does not seem to be a good way to annotate PDFs on Linux. I'm still falling back on LaTeX. Which does the job, but isn't exactly optimal.

Hi @Kusalananda

Pic changed

@PrabhjotSingh Good day!

@PrabhjotSingh Yes. I looked too gloomy in the old profile picture.

Also, celebrating 3000 answers...

Hi folks.

@Kusalananda Not seeing your avatar right now.

On chat, I mean.

@Kusalananda Is there cake? Any good celebration should have cake. Though 3000 candles might be a bit much.

You could have nano-candles. Invisible to the naked eye.

@FaheemMitha I had some cake yesterday, although that was for my grandmother's 90th birthday.

Guys can anyone tell me what the semicolon is doing at the end of this find command:

find . -type f -exec file '{}' \;

If I commit that then I get an error saying that "missing argument to exec"

Never mind found out the answer

@Kusalananda Happy birthday to your grandma.

@ng.newbie It tells find where the command that you use with -exec ends. See e.g. unix.stackexchange.com/questions/389705

Also, {} does not need to be quoted.

Almost time to start obsessively refreshing smile.amazon.com ... :-/

@derobert Why?

prime day starts in ~30m

Could somebody please run the code in my answer here? The user says it does nothing... unix.stackexchange.com/a/456605/116858

@Kusalananda it appears to work with gawk, but not mawk

anthony@Zia:/tmp$ mawk '{ curr=$0; gsub("[[:digit:]]","",curr) } curr != prev { print; prev = curr }' test
abbylove2016
abbylove2017
abbylove2018
abb1999ylover
abb2005ylover
abbyloves2001you
abbyloves2006you
abbylsm1980ith
abbylsm2010ith
abbylyn2002
abbylynn1999
anthony@Zia:/tmp$ gawk '{ curr=$0; gsub("[[:digit:]]","",curr) } curr != prev { print; prev = curr }' test
abbylove2016
abb1999ylover
abbyloves2001you
abbylsm1980ith
abbylyn2002
abbylynn1999

@derobert Why?

Also, it works here...

$ mawk '{ curr=$0; gsub("[[:digit:]]","",curr) } curr != prev { print; prev = curr }' test
abbylove2016
abb1999ylover
abbyloves2001you
abbylsm1980ith
abbylyn2002
abbylynn1999

odd. No clue; different versions maybe?

1.3.3-17+b3 here (Debian testing)

mawk-1.3.4.20171017

Could it be the [[:digits:]]? What do you get with [0-9]?

anthony@Zia:/tmp$ mawk '{ curr=$0; gsub("[0-9]","",curr) } curr != prev { print; prev = curr }' test
abbylove2016
abb1999ylover
abbyloves2001you
abbylsm1980ith
abbylyn2002
abbylynn1999

... so seems that's it

Ok. I'll point the user to this conversation.

I don't know much awk at all (personally, I just use perl) but depending on how awk defines [[:digits:]] ... [0-9] is probably what you want. The Unicode digits character class is much wider than 0-9

So it may be a locale-related thing.

I'll update my answer with [0-9] instead.

I doubt en_US.UTF-8 has any weird ASCII characters in [[:digits:]]

It doesn't.

What I don't quite understand is the downvote. I've gotten an unusual amount of these in the last month. I must have pissed someone off.

Well, I guess "it doesn't work" is a pretty valid reason to downvote. So I can understand that...

Although I certainly wouldn't in this case.

@derobert Oh well. If somebody is industrious enough to test a solution that is shown to work, finds out that it doesn't on their system, and then is lazy enough to not say anything about it to help with correcting for whatever it was that was wrong, then that's just weird.

Hah, if only laziness was weird!

@derobert Laziness coupled with industriousness.

@derobert Should anyone care?

@FaheemMitha yes, Q&A is hard, let's go shopping.

@derobert I think a plastic doll said that. Or a variation on it.

Indeed.

Also, possibly, George W. Bush.

@Kusalananda It's your unfortunate propensity for trying to help people. Clearly it annoys people.

Well, someone.

Trying to edit a PDF with LaTeX is definitely a bit of a weird experience.

Like trying to light a match with a laser.

@FaheemMitha Or the other way around.

@Kusalananda Trying to light a laser with a match? Is that possible?

On the plus side, I learned about a couple of new LaTeX macros.

Apparently there are thousands of them.

@FaheemMitha Well, it's a weird experience.

@Kusalananda Have you done it then?

@FaheemMitha No, not really. No. I have a vivid imaginations. Especially in this heat.

I've used a laser to ionize air though. That was a bang.

@Kusalananda Fortunately there are no explosions with LaTeX.

Do you know why there was a bang?

@Kusalananda Doesn't count.

@FaheemMitha Two ultraviolet lasers focusing on one point. Air in that point gets hot and ionizes, and also expands quickly. It's thunderclap.

@FaheemMitha "Latex explosion stock photos"...? NSFW though...

@Kusalananda Ionizes meaning stripping off electrons, right?

Not sure why it would expand, though.

@FaheemMitha youtu.be/9gDfdp1D2Rw

This one uses a lens rather than two lasers. I'm not sure why there's a green glow. youtu.be/sW5HObAa09M

I'm getting 400 codes for both.

And for youtube too. Hmm.

The ISP might have blocked youtube. What fun.

Never a dull moment around here.

Hmm, both ISPs give the same error.

@FaheemMitha Well, YouTube is obviously just a waste of your time, so you should not be able to access it. Also, absolutely not related to anything political, I'm sure.

@Kusalananda I'm not following. 400 means bad request, which does not suggest the site is being blocked.

@FaheemMitha Hmm... does that mean there's a proxy rewriting the request in-between, and doing it badly? Is it actually youtube.com that gives you the 400 response? What does curl say?

Both links and lynx are showing normal looking pages, so I'm not sure what is going on.

doesn't youtube load over https:// ?

in which case, hard to put a proxy in there

I did an upgrade of my X drivers but haven't rebooted yet. I wonder if that could have screwed something up.

anyway, got to run...

@derobert Ah, you know more about that than I.

I don't see what that would have to do with web traffic.

@FaheemMitha Unlikely.

@Kusalananda No idea, but it doesn't look likely.

@Kusalananda Yes, very.

Anyway, I'll try to figure it out tomorrow, if it hasn't fixed itself by then.

Ok, and I'm off to bed again.