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Occasionally, due to circumstances entirely within my control, I find myself in an odd situation. Bumping into edge cases, doing things the hard way... for whatever reason, I seem to have a knack for finding the approach with the most exotic issues. What follows, is one of these scenarios.
Read the full post: Bash while loop only getting the first value of a file
It turns out, the mpv media player (one of my all-time favorite utilities) can play media files located inside of a compressed archive. If you have a bunch of FLAC files in a zip archive, and tell mpv to play that zip archive... it just does.
Read the full post: mpv can play media within archives
rsync and link-destI 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.
Read the full post: Problems with rsync and link-dest
After creating a whole host of backup DVDs, you might be faced with a dilema; how to verify that each disk was burned properly. Backups aren't backups until they are tested!
Read the full post: Testing backup DVDs without video and audio
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.
Read the full post: Removing leading/trailing spaces in the shell