( ? , qUeStIoNMaRk )

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. From (the wikipedia entry on sysadmin Dasy) :

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, SysAdminDay or SAAD, was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. Kekatos was inspired to create the special day by a Hewlett-Packard magazine advertisement in which a system administrator is presented with flowers and fruit-baskets by grateful co-workers as thanks for installing new printers.[1] The holiday exists to show appreciation for the work of sysadmins and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday in July. The first System Administrator Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000.

As a side note I may suggest you take a while to read this beautiful and involving novel by Cory Doctorow “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”.

Happy Sysadmin Day!

I experienced another small enlightenment, linux administration related, when I discovered bash completition. This feature proves itself useful when you use quite often the shell: during system adminstration, software compilation/testing/deployment/whatever. To enable it, edit your ~/.bashrc file (where ~ means your home directory, e.g. /home/mfabbri), with your favorite editor and uncomment the lines following the one which states # enable programmable completion features .

More extensively from a shell (or a terminal window, as gnome-terminal):

$ vi /etc/bash.bashrc

find the lines :

# enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable
# this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile
# sources /etc/bash.bashrc).
#if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
# . /etc/bash_completion
#fi

and change them into

# enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable
# this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile
# sources /etc/bash.bashrc).
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi

Logoff and login from your shell (if you are using a terminal, as gnome-terminal, restart it) , and you should be able to use completition not only for command/file names/program names, but also for program commands, for example digiting apt-get and pressing the [TAB] key should produce on the output a list of available actions as:

autoclean clean install update
build-dep dist-upgrade remove upgrade
check dselect-upgrade source

It works for many other programs, as cvs, subversion, darcs, ant, maven, java et cetera.
Java needs a special mention, use this feature with care, cause it scans the whole classpath searching for classes, so when it is dealing with huge classpaths it could slow down things a little.

As you may have noticed, you could also enable this feature system wide editing the same way the file /etc/bash.bashrc.