I use rsync to back up many servers and other machines. Because of my very different sources and targets, I have a collection of very complex bash scripts that manage these backups. When I moved one stage of these backups to a new server, it started behaving strangely - and it was difficult to discover why.

• server
• terminal

Sometimes I need to uncompress large archives located in remote locations - for instance, in Amazon S3. Most normal approaches to uncompressing archives involve resource-intensive processes, like downloading the entire file into memory - an approach not tenable for multi-gigabyte files.

• python

Whitespace causes lots of interesting issues with the command line - whether it is present in file names, arguments, or any other data flowing between commands. Quoting can help, but there's some very particular edge cases I've encountered in my scripts.

• linux
• terminal

As an enthusiast of encryption, it always felt a little strange that my servers kept all of their data in the clear. But the problem with encrypting a headless server is that, inevitably, you have to reboot it. So how do you connect to your server and unlock the drive before it boots? It's quite the catch-22.

• linux
• server
• security

If you've ever needed to view all the changes that are happening in a repository or a branch, there are two flags for the git log command that should interest you: git log -c and git log --cc.

• git