It’s a web out there. A web of information that is. Some of it good, some of it bad and some of it there merely for it’s own existance. Any time I need to do something that I can’t remember exactly how to do off the top of my head (that happens so rarely, so I’m sure you can understand why I would be writing about this) I turn to google. Yeah, sure, it’s the beast out there and it’s probably gathering information about me that I don’t really want it to, but I can usually find what I want.
What I’ve come to realize is that there is really very little original content out there. In fact, this couldn’t be made clearer than my current RSS feeds. I see a headline, followed by three more headlines that reference the first headline. Of course, that’s how people find out about things because you might follow what “Joe” writes about, but not what “Joan” writes about. And both of them follow “Bill” and rebroadcast what he writes about. But “Bill”, he follows “Thad” who follows “Joan”……
Hmm… now I’m thinking, could this turn into some kind of critical neverending information overload loop? Where’s the escape clause? ARRRRGHH!! suddenly I’m having flashback of programming in assembly and crashing the mainframe!
OK, so where was I? Oh yeah, I could tell you how to find files on a linux box and run a script on them, I could tell you how to grep for occurances of a phrase within a file or batch of files, but really, chances are someone else already has that information out there. So, with that, I present to you two pages I found today that may or may not be of interest.
ars technica’s page on grep more of an intro, but gives a pretty good feel for the power of grep
technibble – this site looks (at first glance) like it might be a goldmine for information for those in the IT fields.
