The author is one of the top Linux developers around, and a long-time UNIX champion. Fellow Linux developers will benefit from the useful, common-practice shell scripting techniques that the author and his Codemonks Consulting partners employ on a daily basis in their Linux development and applications services work.
Developer’s notebook: Tips from veteran Linux Programmer
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
He said: “Since first experiencing the terse environment of vi on SunOS back in the mid-1980’s, the Emacs editor has become Murray’s standard tool. “It’s available or can be built on every flavor of UNIX, which is a key factor given the cross-platform nature of my contract development work,” he says.”
:q!
There is no shame in putting a sentence that says.. “Read the article here.” with a link on the here.
Since first experiencing the horror that was AmigaEmacs, vi has become MY standard tool. And he doesn’t mention the ksh either, clearly the man is evil 😉
You are truly a sad and paranoid one… “How dare they use emacs!?!” you scream… “If he is using emacs I’m gonna just cover my eyes and plug my ears and scream like a little girl…”
I don’t want to disparage this guy at all, as his background sounds a lot more extensive than mine. But seriously folks, get with the times:
According to Murray there are two killer Linux applications: Emacs and Netscape Navigator.
Well, he was on the team who wrote Netscape. That’s cool. Too bad no one uses “Netscape” anymore. Everybody with a clue has moved on from Netscape to Mozilla (Firebird), Galleon, Konqueror, or Opera. The use of Netscape 4 in this day and age should be a punishable offense.
“Emacs is possibly the most impressive Linux-based and widely used application around,” he says.
If by impressive you mean bloated, I agree 100%. Emacs is proof complicated interfaces need to be modal. Also, for a guy who started on vi this dude never mentions vim. What’s up with that? I find that vim contains all the real useful functionality of Emacs, and everything Emacs has that vim doesn’t is just needless toys.
And how exactly is Emacs “Linux-based”? It’s a POSIX application and runs on a few dozen platforms, including Windows. Methinks some Linux zealotry is afoot at IBM.
“Another is Netscape Navigator. At one point, we supported more than 20 flavors of UNIX, and I did a lot of my work on Linux.”
Yay, that’s great, but no one uses it anymore. So let me get this straight, the two “killer apps” of Linux are… a text editor and a web browser. Isn’t this indicative of something wrong with Linux today if the only two “killer apps” available for the platform are a text editor and a web browser?
If I were to cast my vote for some killer apps for Linux, I’d have to go with things like Apache, Blender, Maya, Oracle, and DB2. These are all high quality applications that make Linux a useful platform.
He continues, “The funny thing is that Linux-based applications will probably run on a bunch of different UNIX systems, even on Windows with Cygwin installed.”
Yes, funny how that whole POSIX standard thing works… how all these operating systems expose more or less the same interface to programmers.
This article seems aimed at non-programmers.
According to Murray, Linux is here to stay. “All of our servers run Linux; the majority of our development is done on Linux, regardless of our target platform; we recommend Linux to clients for server applications,” he says. “If you combine the rapid pace at which Linux develops, its broad base of support in the open source community, and its low cost of development, it’s a difficult platform to beat.”
It’s a difficult platform to beat for writing 100% custom applications maybe? But what for something like publishing? The only alternative to Illustrator Linux supports is Kontour, which is a piece of crap. A page layout application in the same vein as QuarkXPress for doing layout for an entire newspaper? No one is going to want to use Scribus or KPublisher. Scribus may be great for writing your weekly Linux newsletter but what newspaper is going to want it when it doesn’t even have Pantone support? The Gimp? Doesn’t have CMYK or Pantone support. So yes, for publications Linux is a good example of where it’s a pain to get things done.
Keep it real, Linux zealots! Your average business isn’t going to want to throw away Peachtree, Timestamps, or QuickBooks for GNUmeric! Linux may be maturing but until it gets some professional quality applications people are willing to trust their work to, your average person is not going to want to use it!
Here comes the first BIG mega post.. replying to an argument that has no other side…
yeah, but vi is installed by defualt on almost all *nix based os’s.
as a sysadmin you should at least know the basics of vi
-Nex6
I think it’s accurate to say Netscape Navigator is a killer app. All those browsers you listed as alternatives are just that… alternatives derived from NN. Not to say tha NN was the first web browser, but since that time nothing ground breaking or substantial has changed the way we use a web browser. Please don’t make a list like “pop-up stopper, blocking cookies, javascript, plug-ins” as substantial changes to a web browser because they’re more like auxillery features. The web browser still looks and functions pretty much the same.
Console based web browsers to graphical browsers, that’s a substantial change.
Regarding Pantone support for Linux applications, this is hardly the developer’s fault. Pantone is a proprietary – and ridiculously expensive – format for which Adobe and Quark pay big bucks.
There are a few solutions here: either the printing industry slowly introduces a new, open standard (which would cost the industry millions of dollars, so I wouldn’t hold my breath…); or the owners of the Panton brand soften their royalty requirements and/or opens up Pantone (which could conceivably happen with enough pressure from OSS advocates – maybe!); or people just keep using Photoshop though Crossover Office (which is what I’m currently doing).
Your average business isn’t going to want to throw away Peachtree, Timestamps, or QuickBooks for GNUmeric!
I don’t know about the others, but I’m pretty sure you can run QuickBooks on Linux with Crossover Office.
How about his lack of indentation, or the useless suffixes .sh and .pl he puts on the? I would think the indentation thing is an error of the editor’s, but the two PRINTFs are indented.
This article is about as cohesive as milk and whiskey. The C code may be clever, but a little help with the GNU C extensions is in order, or at least a simple explanation of how it works, instead of making us try to divine it from the prototypes.
TLy (IP: —.client.dsl.net)
I think it’s accurate to say Netscape Navigator is a killer app. All those browsers you listed as alternatives are just that… alternatives derived from NN.
Mozilla and Galeon are very loosely tied to the original Netscape Navigator source, which was mostly scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Most notably NGLayout (http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/), commonly referred to as “Gecko”, was written from scratch.
Opera and Konqueror/KHTML are not derived from Netscape in any way.
Not to say tha NN was the first web browser, but since that time nothing ground breaking or substantial has changed the way we use a web browser.
I think all Opera users would disagree with you. Opera revolutionized the web browser when it added MDI, which has since been partially duplicated in the form of tabs by virtually every other browser. Opera also added gestures, another feature copied by several other borwsers. Most recently Opera has added fast forward/rewind, which haven’t yet been duplicated by other browsers but are sure to be sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile, what did Netscape add that was so revolutionary which Mosaic didn’t support? GIF89a support? Frames? Aren’t these features that we would be better off without?
Please don’t make a list like “pop-up stopper, blocking cookies, javascript, plug-ins” as substantial changes to a web browser because they’re more like auxillery features. The web browser still looks and functions pretty much the same.
I hope you will consider features like MDI, gestures, and fast forward/rewind a substantial change as they drastically alter the way a web browser is used.
Great Cthulhu (IP: 209.47.215.—)
Regarding Pantone support for Linux applications, this is hardly the developer’s fault. Pantone is a proprietary – and ridiculously expensive – format for which Adobe and Quark pay big bucks.
I don’t think Raou ever implied it was the developer’s fault. Pantone colors are a feature that is sorely needed by those doing prepress work, but a feature that it is impossible for open source applications to deliver. Because of this, we are unlikely to see many professionals migrating from InDesign to QuarkXPress.
How about his lack of indentation, or the useless suffixes .sh and .pl he puts on the?
.sh and .pl are a fairly standard convention. They aren’t useless either, they provide metadata which can be easily interpreted when viewing a directory listing, something which can be done via a variety of protocols. Extensions are also the primary way of determining MIME types, as very few file managers/servers support a magic number based means of determing MIME types.
Uhh… Dude? You can still get Netscape 7, which uses the new mozilla engine. Just because you don’t use it, doesn’t mean other people don’t.
As for vi vs vim – I agree with you, but personal preference as always.
As for commercial quality applications, I understand where you are coming from, and your are quite correct. We Linux developers agree, but bitching about the lack of Photoshop on Linux isn’t going to do squat unless Adobe ports it. Since they don’t appear to want to do so, we’ve had write our own. Some of these applications are brilliant (Apache,Galeon), some are pretty damn good OpenOffice.Org, some need a lot of work (scribus), and others also have a different interface (Gimp).
Also, you forget Rule #10. You are not the market.
There is no average user. For a large number of users who simply surf the ‘net and do basic spreadsheet/word processing (my parents for example) Linux works better than Windows. (And Macs aren’t an option, they’re just too darn expensive over here, when compared to the PC option running Linux).
For a large number of users who simply surf the ‘net and do basic spreadsheet/word processing (my parents for example) Linux works better than Windows.
If you count 1% as a large number, sure. Seriously. Look at zeitgeist, see what your friends are using. Get some perspective.
… So let me get this straight, the two “killer apps” of Linux are… a text editor and a web browser. Isn’t this indicative of something wrong with Linux today if the only two “killer apps” available for the platform are a text editor and a web browser?
If I were to cast my vote for some killer apps for Linux, I’d have to go with things like Apache, Blender, Maya, Oracle, and DB2. These are all high quality applications that make Linux a useful platform.
Ok… I think that you need to realize what makes a ‘killer app’ – it’s an application that suddenly makes a particular platform viable for a *lot* of people. AOL considered Instant Messaging to be a killer app. Microsoft considered Word, Excel as killer apps. Apache, Blender, etc are all *great* apps, but none are “killer”… (except maybe Apache) . Maya, or Alias, was supposed to be the killer app for SGI. I trust that Netscape was originally developed on the *nix platform, so yeah – it was a killer app!
According to Murray, Linux is here to stay. […stuff deleted…]
It’s a difficult platform to beat for writing 100% custom applications maybe? But what for something like publishing?
Ok… what exactly is your beef with this? He said that Linux is here to stay. He didn’t say that it was going to replace Mac and Windows as desktop platforms.
sheesh, some people!
Your point about determining MIME types is well taken, especially considering Windows doesn’t use magic numbers, and the article does strongly advocate cross-platform programming.
However, as a Unix user, I don’t want to have to remember what language a program is written in to use it. I would rather only need to remember getrpms, not getrpms.sh or getrpms.pl, .py, whatever – for every little script we write. And what if you wanted to rewrite the script someday in a different language? Every reference to it would need to be tracked down and fixed, or the program left with an incorrect extension (and what about your poor users). So either you’re kind to Windows-style file managers, or kind to command line users. I guess it depends on which side of the bascule you’re leaning.
Isn’t there a way to make an alias or symlink so that ‘getrpms’ would launch ‘getrpms.sh’ or ‘getrpms.pl’? If so you would still need to take time to create the alias or symlink.
Nothing is perfect.
“””If by impressive you mean bloated, I agree 100%.”””
How is emacs bloated? Modules are autoloaded when needed. It’s smaller than Gedit memory wise (and probably just about what gvim is).
daniel (IP: —.telia.com):
“For a large number of users who simply surf the ‘net and do basic spreadsheet/word processing (my parents for example) Linux works better than Windows.”
If you count 1% as a large number, sure. Seriously. Look at zeitgeist, see what your friends are using. Get some perspective.
a) “…Linux works better than Windows”, not “…Linux is more popular than Windows.”
b) “Look at the Zeitgeist” is a tired argument. A great many Linux users masquerade their browsers as win32/IE6 to have access to cartel-controlled websites.
How’s that for perspective?
ILBT,
GG