Why does ncurses support only eight colors? If you've looked into the color palette available in curses, you may wonder why curses supports only eight colors. The curses.h include file defines these color macros: COLOR_BLACK COLOR_RED COLOR_GREEN COLOR_YELLOW COLOR_BLUE COLOR_MAGENTA COLOR_CYAN COLOR_WHITE But why only eight colors, and why these particular colors? At least with the Linux console, if you're running on a PC, the color range's origins are with the PC hardware.

Protect your code commits from malicious changes by GPG-signing them.

Learn the fundamentals of sorting and de-duplicating text on the command line. If you've been using the command line for a long time, it's easy to take the commands you use every day for granted. But, if you're new to the Linux command line, there are several commands that make your life easier that you may not stumble upon automatically. In this article, I cover the basics of two commands that are essential in anyone's arsenal: sort and uniq.

Don't test your code? pytest removes any excuses. Software developers don't just write software; they also use software. So, they're the first to recognize, and understand, that software is complex and inevitably contains bugs.

Generally when we think of shell scripts we think of editable text, but it's possible to add binary data to your shell script as well. In this case we're going to talk about adding a binary payload to the end of your shell script.

Mypy can check more than simple Python types. In my last article, I introduced Mypy, a package that enforces type checking in Python programs. Python itself is, and always will remain, a dynamically typed language. However, Python 3 supports "annotations", a feature that allows you to attach an object to variables, function parameters and function return values. These annotations are ignored by Python itself, but they can be used by external tools.

Forget all of those magical command-line PDF incantations and edit your PDFs easily with Xournal. Somehow, despite all the issues with proprietary clients and the history of security issues with Acrobat, PDFs have become the de facto standard for your average print-ready document shared around the office. Sure, people might use some kind of open document format or a cloud editor if they intend to edit a document, but if the goal is to print the document or lock its contents in place, most people these days will export it to a PDF.

With Hiera, you can externalize your systems' configuration data and easily understand how those values are assigned to your servers. With that data separated from your Puppet code, you then can encrypt sensitive values, such as passwords and keys.

If you've used the command line much at all you know about I/O redirection for redirecting input to and/or output from a program. What you don't see all that often or that you may not be familiar with is redirecting I/O inside a bash script. And I'm not talking about redirections that you use when your script executes another command, I'm talking about redirecting your script's I/O once it has already started executing.

In shell-speak, globbing is what the shell does when you use a wildcard in a command (e.g. * or ?). Globbing is matching the wildcard pattern and returning the file and directory names that match and then replacing the wildcard pattern in the command with the matched items. Bash version 4.0 adds a new globbing option called globstar which treats the pattern ** differently when it's set.