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Unix

Articles and publications tagged Unix across the Atmosphere.

50articles13publications
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 6, 2026
Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse
The essay I promised back in May. A history of public-access Unix from Dennis Ritchie's 'fellowship' and Grex's potluck dinners to Paul Ford's drunken tilde.club and ~vilmibm's birthday gift to themself; a tour of the seven tildes I call home (including the starship I captain on cosmic.voyage); what kernel exploits and an rm -rf / taught the tildeverse about fragility; and how to move in yourself.
technicalSmall Web
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 25, 2026
A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress
I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300-baud Apple IIe BBS to today's NetBSD network of DEC Alphas and Opterons; a tour of the shell, gopher, and gemini services; how to join, plus two hands-on bonuses: writing a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook and making a site Dillo-compatible.
technicaltutorial
Today I Learned
Today I LearnedAug 11, 2026
Inspecting Processes with ps
Process selection, custom output, state codes, and portability across Unix systems
unixcommand-line
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJun 11, 2026
Migrating from GNU stow to chezmoi
Why I swapped GNU stow's symlink farm for chezmoi: one command to bootstrap a Mac with Homebrew packages and macOS settings, a small daily sync loop, and agent skills shared between Claude Code and Codex.
1
ShellCLI
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsMar 28, 2026
Background jobs and inherited file descriptors
Why & backgrounds execution but doesn't stop output from flooding your terminal.
ShellUnix
griff
griffMar 12, 2026
waving goodbye to windows - part 1
Okay, so the title might be a little misleading. I waved goodbye to Windows in favor of Linux (obligatory "I use Arch, btw") some time ago. Given that my personal laptop's hardware was of the 2016 era, I just couldn't run Windows very well any longer. Not that I wanted to anyway. I opted for an Arch-based distribution called CachyOS, set it up once, and didn't fiddle with it at all. It worked great! But as the aging hardware continued to cause problems, it became apparent that it was time to mov...
1
macoshardware
Mahib's Margins
Mahib's MarginsJun 18, 2025
I kind of like rebasing
Master git rebase for cleaner commit history. Learn interactive rebasing, squashing commits, and rebasing feature branches onto main with practical examples.
gitShell
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJan 11, 2025
Dynamic shell variables
Learn variable indirection in Bash with ${!var} syntax. Build context-aware configs, function dispatch, and dynamic variable name resolution.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsDec 31, 2024
Running only a single instance of a process
Prevent multiple script instances with file locking. Use flock in Bash, fcntl in Python, and syscall.Flock in Go for single-instance processes.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsDec 17, 2024
SSH saga
Complete SSH setup guide: key pairs, authorized_keys, sshd_config, ssh_config, known_hosts, agent forwarding, and hardening for secure remote access.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsOct 2, 2024
Discovering direnv
Automate environment variables per directory with direnv. Load .envrc files on entry, unload on exit. Integrate with Python venv and uv workflow.
TILShell
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsSep 20, 2024
Bash namerefs for dynamic variable referencing
Master Bash namerefs with declare -n to create dynamic variable references. Build generic functions for arrays and associative arrays without eval.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsSep 12, 2024
Shell redirection syntax soup
Complete guide to Bash redirection. Master stdout, stderr, pipes, tee, file descriptors, and shorthand syntax with practical examples for every case.
ShellUnix
sunshowers
sunshowersSep 3, 2024
Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling
An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.
signalsunix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsAug 8, 2024
HTTP requests via /dev/tcp
Make raw HTTP requests with Bash's /dev/tcp file descriptor. Build health check scripts without curl or wget using TCP socket connections.
TILShell
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJul 28, 2024
The *nix install command
Replace mkdir, cp, and chmod with a single install command. Copy files, create directories, and set permissions in one step with GNU coreutils.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJul 19, 2024
Here-doc headache
Avoid here-doc pitfalls when running remote commands via SSH. Learn variable expansion gotchas and simpler alternatives for deployment scripts.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJun 18, 2024
I kind of like rebasing
Master git rebase for cleaner commit history. Learn interactive rebasing, squashing commits, and rebasing feature branches onto main with practical examples.
gitShell
Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet
Tedium: The Dull Side of the InternetFeb 8, 2024
sudo embrace
Microsoft’s decision to introduce sudo for Windows is strangely symbolic of how influential UNIX has been even on non-UNIX ecosystems.
sudounix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsOct 29, 2023
Pesky little scripts
Organize custom scripts with comma-prefixed naming. Improve tab completion and eliminate clutter by prefixing script names with special characters.
ShellUnix
frankhecker.com
frankhecker.comOct 28, 2023
Remembrance of computers past
I reminisce about the computers of my youth.
retrocomputingPDP-8
Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet
Tedium: The Dull Side of the InternetOct 12, 2023
Making Way For Wayland
With recent moves made by prominent players, Wayland seems closer than ever to being the ultimate path for Linux users—but, let’s be honest, X11 will never truly die.
linuxxorg
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsSep 27, 2023
Dotfile stewardship for the indolent
Manage dotfiles across devices with GNU Stow. Symlink configuration files from git repo to home directory with simple, idempotent commands.
ShellUnix
Redowan's Reflections
Redowan's ReflectionsJul 17, 2023
Using DNS record to share text data
Share data via DNS TXT records using dig and base64 encoding. Learn limitations, security concerns, and practical use cases for DNS tunneling.
ShellUnix