Tagged: hacking

Why 80 characters? 0

Hacking

Why 80 characters?

Searching for reasonable values for the *.vt100.geometry[5-6] xterm menu font-menu options in my ~/.Xdefaults file, I re-stumbled a gem of computing history as the top-answer to a question on StackOverflow, and this pretty picture of an old IBM punch-card. Inspired by a perl script within the comments, I ran this shell pipe: 2015-07-23 10:30:00 :: ~ rons@rons-VM$ find /usr/share/terminfo/ -type f -printf ‘%f\n’ | xargs -n1 infocmp | egrep -o ‘cols#[0-9]+, *lines#[0-9]+’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head 489 cols#80, lines#24 58...

Shell Nuggets: Musing on Dates 0

Hacking / Whimsy

Shell Nuggets: Musing on Dates

Nigh ever day I happen across some gem tucked away in the opaque vista of the *nix command-line shell.   While attempting to contrive the proper arguments for a date command interpolation, the following editorial injection from its GNU info entry caught my fancy. 28 Date input formats ********************* First, a quote: Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some...