TL;DR Applying some Bash knowhow on exit codes, you can cut down the time required for a Terraform apply if no changes are to be done. The Simple Plan and Apply Over the past couple of weeks, I’d been working on getting our alerts deployed with Terraform. The initial proof of concept was a very simple shell script with a lot of copy-paste to handle the many accounts, environments and regions that I work on.

Since my new job involves lot more of Linux, shell scripting bash and automation, I’ve been trying to brush up my Linux skills. Ran into this “problem” today where there’s an init script which handles unicorn start/stop/reload and we were debugging some kinks around this. The init script had a chain of cd to the directory and the unicorn invoke script. Was trying to figure out why unicorn wasn’t starting up, till I read a bit more and dropped to using echo to understand what’s happening

This morning in my half-woken state, as I was checking Hacker News, I spotted this piece about Alienware launching the X51 with Ubuntu. I initially thought I was dreaming, and woke up immediately and read the piece, and I was left dumbfounded when I read it again to be sure. Kind of dumbfounded at Dell launching an Alienware X51 with Ubuntu https://alienware.com/ubuntu/ Not sure what’s Dell thinking - there aren’t any great native AAA games available, can’t imagine this would make studios to make Linux ports either

Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

About 2 weeks ago, Wakoopa announced that they will be shutting down their social network soon & focusing on “Corporate Research”. Unfortunately that day is here. Just received an email stating that as of today, you can grab an export of your data. This is what they have to say about the export The export is a CSV file containing the following columns: application name, subcategory, category, the number of seconds you've used the application in the hour, the hour you've used the application in, the date of the usage, the operating system and your user id.

ln -s d1 d2 # Am I the only person who gets this the wrong way round every fucking time? Similar to most people who have posted there - I used to still get it wrong every time. It’s become a habit for me to do a man ln or ln -help before I execute this command :\ Great tip here though: but then I finally found out about the relationship between ln and cp

I’ve used find extensively and always wanted to writeup a nice post on this, but the linked post trumps my effort! Copy pasted from his blog, as the person’s allowed to do so. Also, as a general note - before using exec with the actual command, do preview it! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ remove empty directories ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ # find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ change various file attributes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ # find .

I did something crazy at some point that created a file called “-rf” on my filesystem. Now I can’t figure out how to delete it. I’ve tried: rm "-rf" rm -rf But these just exit immediately. Arrgh! Anyone know how to remove this file? Preferably without accidentally cleaning out my whole folder. heh. What’re the odds, eh? via Removing “-rf” file in Unix - Super User.

I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my repis a testament to that I guess ;) ) - both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by). Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question - which went like - I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.

Quick tip - if you use the Terminal as much as I do, ever been in a situation where you’ve written a particularly long command, and then want to issue that command again but can’t recall it ? Use the history command, and pipe it to grep to search it! history | grep -i <search-term> This will give you all commands with the search term and the corresponding line number.