It took me a fair while to get comfortable with the ISO 8601 date format. After so many years of using DD MMM YYYY, my old eyes and brain had some trouble understanding YYYY-MM-DD. Finally something clicked, and I now read 'ISOdates' easily and I really appreciate their advantages. The biggest…

I recently scripted a GUI dialog that lists my 10 most recently modified files in reverse chronological order and allows me to choose more than 1 file for opening. The dialog is launched with a keyboard shortcut and is shown here with 2 files selected: The script is in copy-and-paste form at the…

My wife likes to organise and store information in Gnumeric spreadsheets. Every now and then she needs to filter her data and save the result to a new spreadsheet. Gnumeric doesn't have a simple way to do that. It has a complicated way to do it ('Advanced Filter'), but nothing so straightforward as…

You can store a code snippet in a shell alias or a function, but when you type the alias or function name in a BASH shell and press 'Enter', the shell executes (or tries to execute) the snippet. That's no good if the snippet is incomplete or needs editing. A simple workaround is to paste the…

The file I'll be using for this demonstration is called demo and looks like this: demo is plain text with 2 tab-separated columns. The first column is sorted alphabetically, but the second column isn't sorted. What I want to find out is how many different letters are in the second column for each…

I worked on these bits of code to simplify a shell script of mine. You really wouldn't want to see the script's original commands here — they're way too ugly! The new commands are much prettier and work well. The problem To simplify the story, here's a comma-separated table called demo, sorted on t…

No, these aren't homework problems from a computer science class. They're interesting head-scratchers based on a data-analysis project I worked on recently, with the data 'reimagined' here for simplicity but with the underlying problems intact. We'll start with boys and girls, which are text files…

The complicated-looking script at the end of this article is in two parts. The first part detects the changes made when a data table is edited, and reports the changes as a plain-text logfile. It's a straightforward bit of shell scripting based on the diff command. The second part of the script…

Having a TL;DR day? In a nutshell, I just replaced a 2011 HP Mini netbook with a 2014 HP mini-notebook. Both run Linux. Thank you, HP. The netbook I bought a 2011 HP Mini 110-3744TU in early 2012 (specs below). It came with Windows 7 'starter', which I replaced with CrunchBang Linux. The Mini is…

In 2003 a strange paragraph made the rounds on email. It read: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a…