GNU AWK is a great tool for working with tables of data, and by using AWK arrays, you can quickly do column sums (and other calculations) based on unique values in another column (see below). Pivot tables in AWK are a bit trickier. In this article I do a slow walk through the code for a simple…

There was much rejoicing and fanfare earlier today among Linux gamers eagerly awaiting the Linux release of The Witcher 2 - Assassins of Kings, which has landed on Steam For Linux. However, some of the rejoicing was short-lived. It didn't take long for Linux users to dig deeper into the downloaded…

Many of you can probably relate to this: that machine, whether it be a laptop or a desktop computer, that just seems to hate any Linux operating system you throw at it. Poor performance, inefficiency or non-working bits of hardware or functionalities seem the norm whenever you try your favourite…

Command line wizards are forever encouraging the rest of us to learn regular expressions (regex). We're told regex is elegant, powerful and incredibly useful. The downside is that regex can be seriously fiddly. One fly-spot out of place, and the code fails. For this reason I only use 'non-simple'…

EDIT 26/04/2014 I wrote the original fandr script to do single-word replacements in big files. To do multiple-word find-and-replace, the 'needle' variables have to be double-quoted, as in the revised script below. An example of a multiple-word replacement is at the end of this article. I use two…

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few weeks, you would have heard about GOG.com (formally known as Good Old Games) finally announcing they will be adding Linux support! I think this is a great thing and here's 5 good reasons why. Now okay, technically, they are (at least initially)…

YAD (Yet Another Dialog) creates GUI dialogs for data entry, user notification, etc. It was written by Victor Ananjevsky and is described as a fork of Zenity. In fact, it greatly extends Zenity and has a very large number of handy options. Here I explain how to build a multiple-item data entry form…

Switching to Linux requires users to abandon their usual set of favourite programs and to employ what is available. In terms of archive utilities the first and most obvious choice is the GNOME desktop environment File Roller. But does a Linux neophyte ready to get into all that stuff at once? Let’s f…

Trove is the National Library of Australia's online database. It contains almost 400 000 000 digital items, including Australian newspaper articles from 1803 to 1954. Trove's newspaper portal is particularly useful. You can view an entire digitised newspaper page, or select (or search for) an…

I recently wrote about how the Birdie project, a lightweight and attractive Twitter client for Linux, was being rewritten and reborn as Birdie 2.0, an entirely new codebase. The Birdie Development team were kind enough to provide The Linux Rain with a private preview build of the new upcoming…

If you do a Web search for 'linux delete blank lines' you'll find lots of command-line advice. Some of the advice, though, only applies to special cases. Here I explain two elegant and general methods for finding and deleting any blank lines in a text file. As a sample text I'll use the 8-line file…