@Jesse_b Is that meant to be an image?

@FaheemMitha knowyourmeme.com/memes/trollface

Hello everyone.

Hi @PrabhjotSingh

@FaheemMitha Hello. I have a question.

@PrabhjotSingh Is it the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything?

@FaheemMitha Pardon?

@PrabhjotSingh That was intended to be a joke.

@FaheemMitha OK.

Apparently not a successful one, though.

So, what's your question?

I have four files in books folder. ls | grep 'views' gives views.tex views.aux views.log views.pdf

i want to remove these four files in one line. How?

Problem is that sometimes there are five to seven files.@FaheemMitha

Hello Vorlon

@PrabhjotSingh Why do you want to remove them?

They are produced by a TeX run. If you run TeX again, those files will be regenerated.

@FaheemMitha I accidently reanmed .tex file. now i have duplicate files. rm command demands every file's name.

Or I should ask a question on site?

@PrabhjotSingh You could just do rm views.*. Though I'm not a shell wizard like folks here.

BTW, I hope you are using version control. If you aren't, you really, really should.

And backups too, of course.

@FaheemMitha It worked perfectly. Thx

@PrabhjotSingh It should. That's called globbing. But see my comment above, about version control.

@FaheemMitha I don't know version control. tell me about it.

@PrabhjotSingh I can send you a link or two.

Here is a Mercurial tutorial.

@FaheemMitha Thanks.

Or you could just do a google search for "mercurial tutorial", and follow the links.

You could also do the same for "git tutorial".

I use Mercurial, but lots of people use Git.

btw you were right about beamer.

There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's really useful if working with text files. And even other types of files.

@PrabhjotSingh Right about what?

@FaheemMitha that beamer is useful for slides or presentations.

@PrabhjotSingh Yes, that's what it's designed for.

@FaheemMitha this makes font size large. imo that is not for regular documents.

@PrabhjotSingh It does?

@FaheemMitha beamer spoils regular files.

one more thing, how can i make two columns in a page?

@PrabhjotSingh I think there is a two column package.

For simple questions, a google search (or similar) will work.

@FaheemMitha i am not a member of Tex SE, How could I asked question in their chatroom?

@FaheemMitha I will try that. thanks for your help.

@PrabhjotSingh Anyone can join the site. But you need a little rep to join Chat. 20, I think?

TeX SE is generally friendly towards beginners, though they like it if you do make an effort first. Though that's true of all the SE sites.

@FaheemMitha agreed. I am wrong when i say .tex is only for academic stuff.

Aloha @Jesse_b

@PrabhjotSingh wat up

@Jesse_b For version control GitHub account is necessary ?

@PrabhjotSingh Only if you are using github for version control

@Jesse_b Ok

@PrabhjotSingh No, of course not.

Github is a site for hosting projects using Git.

@FaheemMitha I think some people do use it for version control

@Jesse_b They're using Git for version control. Github is a site.

fair enough

@FaheemMitha Got it. GitHub == version control for team work

I ask stupid questions most of the time.

@PrabhjotSingh Github is just a place to store Git repositories. And you can operate on the repositories with tools the site give you.

@FaheemMitha Ok.

@FaheemMitha Probably time for one, but unfortunately I'm really busy now. Moving a bunch of stuff we have at work to the cloud, since our colo gave us, err, maybe two months notice that "GUESS WHAT, WE'RE CLOSING THIS COLO!"

@derobert Hey. Long time no see (figuratively speaking).

@derobert And can't you just move it to a different colo?

@FaheemMitha That'd be even more work. And expense.

@derobert Oh?

We'd have to have stuff running at both colos while switching over. So that'd mean purchasing a bunch more hardware. And setting all that up, etc.

Turns out it will be cheaper to host it all in the cloud anyway.

(Well, except the tel servers, because you can't really get PRIs delivered to the cloud)

So the tel servers will go to one location. The rest is moving to Google Compute Engine.

@derobert I see. Ugh, why is the solution to everything these days either Google or Amazon?

Because you forgot about Azure

You can also pick Microsoft, Digitalocean, or a few others.

@MichaelHomer MS? Not much of an improvement.

Ok, let me change it to - why is the solution to everything these days some giant soulless corporation?

Wasn't any different before. The colo was owned by (through several layers), I'd have to look it up to be sure, Dell. The hardware was made by Supermicro and Intel...

I guess you could go look at openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds ; not all of those are giant.

Most aren't.

@derobert So, you're going to be busy for awhile?

another week, at least. After that... well, deadline is end of March. So it can't last that much longer.

But I'm down to the last few things to get running at Google. So I'm hoping to be done next week.

@derobert I hope they're not making you do too much overtime.

Overdoing it at computers isn't great for the health.

Not that much, no. But I don't have much time for SE currently.

@derobert Fair enough.

BTW — any idea what the quickest way to ask apt-get if I need to run apt-get update because I don't have lists downloaded is?

@derobert If you're asking me, no. But I'm barely awake as it is.

I'm not even sure I understand your question.

I want to know if I need to run apt-get update because, e.g., I've just changed the mirrors in /etc/apt/sources.list

Well, or I want a script to know.

@derobert :D Ah!

I thought your account was hacked.

(!) .... did something weird happen? Or just that I've been afk for a bit?

I'm reading bottom-to-top...

@derobert Why not just run apt-get update? That's what we used to do, back in the old country.

@FaheemMitha I could. But that takes time (the main worry), and increases the container size if it isn't needed.

@derobert When /etc/apt/sources.list is newer than the newest date in /var/lib/apt/lists/

Good enough?

@Fabby Normally that'd work, but in this case I'm actually switching sources.list files by putting -oDir::Etc::SourceList= on the apt-get command line ...

.Urgh... You're making this hard!

(but then, if it wasn't, you wouldn't be asking...)

;-)

Indeed. I'm trying to use a different mirror when building images at the office vs. when building them on GCE, because getting the right apt setup makes builds much faster.

I was just about to put a flag file in /run, but I see docker does not mount a tmpfs there. WTF.

You're much smarter than me, so I'm just a post you can bounce ideas of, but how about creating an alias for apt that checks if you're passing that parameter and then update?

well, the one with the parameter only ever gets called from a single shell script. It used to check for /var/lib/apt/lists/lock which worked, until someone calls apt-get update outside that script, which uses the other sources.list.

Docker does give me a tmpfs on /dev/shm ... so I think I'll abuse that for my flag file. Should work well enough.

@derobert Save state in a file in that script and then compare to current?

@derobert Yeah. flag file...

Yep. Just needed to find a tmpfs to put it on.

Well, I've used docker for a week to be aware of what it can do, so...

I'm just a suit that needs to know the big picture and what is possible and what is not and what might be

It makes a great dev tool to ultimately build images to run with rkt, that's what I think of Docker ☺

@derobert :D

I think of it as a security nightmare.

Yeah. But when you can easily create a fresh, brand-new VM to run a build on, then destroy it afterwards... it's OK. To do a build on. Despite the fact that far too many docker builds (read: almost all) run as root.

@derobert Yup...

Here's a user that wants us to help him change an ISP's router config Perfect for you @RuiFRibeiro

:D ;-)

@Jesse_b My granny used to tell me: "If you stop learning something new every day, you're ready to die..."

Back in the 90s I once tried explaining my then 80-YO granny what my job was (I was a programmer at the time) so I brought a Thinkpad to her and showed her the application I was developing and she didn't get it.

So I showed her Word and her reaction was So you're a secretary?

So I showed her Excel and she went So you're an accountant?

So I showed her Microsoft Media Player playing some video clip and she went So you work for TV!! Which channel?

Me: It's a channel on the Internet, which doesn't play on TVs, just on computers...

She was very impressed by that!

(and never understood what I was actually doing)

Hah, well, when she was young, a computer was a woman who sat in an room doing math.

@derobert She was born in 1912... she saw boats being replaced by airplanes, men land on the moon and in 2000 she told me:

Now I'm really living in the future!

LOL

Good chance she was born in a home without electricity.

She's seen much more change in her life then we'll ever see in ours unless someone builds that transporter that's been around on paper since the 1960s!!!!

Or just even a PlanetGate!

Doesn't even have to be a Stargate! A PlanetGate will do!!!

0:-)

The amount of change from, say, the late 1800s to the late 1900s is amazing. Impossible to imagine what the world would be like if we repeated the same amount of change over the next 100 years.

@Jesse_b :D The Rube Goldberg machine of typing o/

=)

@derobert That won't happen, man!

Just look at the US of A.

@Fabby At least it wasn't written in ed.

It went straight from barbarism into decadence without the intervention of civilization whatsoever!

:D ;-)

@derobert That has been... 30 years ago?

lemme think: I switched from CP/M to MS-DOS in 89...

Wow, the conversation here really moves. I thought the topic was apt.

@derobert Hah! 30 years exactly since I haven't used ed!

@Fabby Sounds like a question for JeffSchaller, if he's still writing everything in ed

@FaheemMitha DeRobert doing apt is *waaaaaaay above my head!

I should try ed right now! @JeffSchaller

I'm hoping this, err, kluge fixes my apt problem:

if ! [ -f /dev/shm/pkg-add-apt-update ] || ! [ -f /var/lib/apt/lists/lock ]; then
	apt-get "${aptopt[@]}" update
	touch /dev/shm/pkg-add-apt-update
fi

See if it has changed since last time I used it!

@derobert lemme run it through shellcheck, because the logic seems legit...

;-)

Whistles...

anthony@Zia:~$ ed
a
Hello, world!
.
w /dev/chat
/dev/chat: Permission denied
?
Q

@Fabby seems ed is working fine, though it doesn't have permission to chat here, apparently.

@derobert :D :D :D

And, wow, if someone actually writes a kernel driver to make a /dev/chat ... (!)

of course, unix.stackexchange.com/questions/477117/… might make it possible. Unless it turns out /dev/chat is a block device. No idea.

There is github.com/acozzette/BUSE, but it's probably a character device. Like a tape drive.

I know that I know nothing...

Maybe I should try to build Arch from scratch so that I get some more under-the-hood knowledge about Linux.

@Fabby You should try to setup kali and be sure to ask lots of questions about it on here

@Jesse_b I've actualy downloaded Kali to a USB drive and booted it that way to see what all the fuss was about...

@Fabby you should! (Without having seen any context yet) -- and consider being the 6th and final vote on this! unix.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5174/117549

:D Upvoted!

gnu ed differs from CP/M ed though.

At the time, [Ctrl][Z] ended input.

So when that sent ed to the background, I just Q

@Fabby thank you!! :D 🎉

fab-user@fab-ux-predator:/tmp
$ ed test.txt
test.txt: No such file or directory
i
This is a test
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 ed test.txt
fab-user@fab-ux-predator:/tmp
$ fg
ed test.txt
q
^C
?
q
?
Q

My first and last experience with gnu ed... ---^

@JeffSchaller This is what I was familiar with until 1989, when I switched to MS-DOS.

@JeffSchaller -1, fails to call it the standard text editor. (Just kidding.)

Yeah! Just found out docker's COPY --from=«image» fails at caching. Grrr.

(I changed the RUN commands for that image, but it still used the old cache.)