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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 snippet at the next shell prompt, as explained (in this article).

Feeling like something different, I recently bought a HP Chromebook 11. In this article I give my impressions on the device itself and also some Linux-specific goodness thanks to something caled Crouton, plus a few thoughts on working in the "cloud".

For those unaware, NVIDIA Optimus is a technology that allows integrated Intel graphics and a discrete NVIDIA graphics card to be built into the same computer (generally a laptop) and switch between the two on-demand. This same technology is also the cause of Linus Torvalds' infamous "finger" gesture directed at NVIDIA themselves. So it's no secret that NVIDIA Optimus technology has a somewhat controversial relationship with the Linux platform. So how is the state of affairs currently?

When I bought the HP Mini three years ago I loaded it with Linux before the pre-installed Windows 7 could even boot.

The new mini-notebook came with Windows 8.1, a Windows bootloader and UEFI. Bless you, HP, they weren't a problem.

The script explained in this article does fast KML-building with lat/lons given in degree-minute-second (DMS) format, like 41°26'35"S 103°57'08"E. Not so simple a script, but AWK and sed were my trusty friends for this job.

In this article I explain one way to group data items with AWK arrays. The code is a little mysterious but the results are impressive, especially in my second example!

There are two easy-to-use tools for generating numerical sequences. 'Brace expansion' is a BASH shell built-in, while the seq command is included in the GNU/Linux 'coreutils' package. Each tool has its peculiarities and advantages

If you're anything like me, you've probably heard about this new thing from Canonical called "Snappy" Ubuntu Core, but at the same time trying to understand exactly what it is may leave you cross-eyed, especially with the buzzwords such as "cloud", "containers" and "apps" floating about. Once you get a handle on it, it's obvious that Canonical's new baby isn't terribly useful for those of us who are simply users, but perhaps it provides an interesting preview of what could come to the desktop version of Ubuntu in the future.

I often look something up in Wikipedia when reading non-browser documents, like PDFs, ODTs and emails. I wanted to have a little desktop window for those look-ups - somewhere I could check Wikipedia without opening a browser and without leaving the document I'm reading. This article describes how I hacked a simple 'desktop Wikipedia checker' with a shell script.

As a means to store data, plain text is just as good as a spreadsheet, and plain text is a lot more accessible. The spreadsheet file can only be opened by the spreadsheet program, or by (another) spreadsheet or database program which can import the file without mangling it. A plain text file, in contrast, can be opened with any text editor or word processor, or even in a terminal with the cat command.

But storage and access aren't the whole story. I also want to add, delete, find and modify data items. I might want to use the data for various calculations. I definitely want to generate reports based on querying the data. Can I do all that with plain text?

We all take notes in various ways. Whether it's old fashioned sticky notes littering the front of your PC monitor, an app on your smartphone or simply using your brain to take a 'mental note' (if your memory is that good!), it's a useful activity. How about note taking on the command-line? And in a really Unix-y, flexible way? Memo might be for you.

I have a data-entry script which adds records to a plain-text data table. It's a fairly complicated script with a GUI dialog, and until recently it added one record at a time. To add another record, I had to launch the script again. Was there a simple way (I asked myself) to re-run the script, or exit it, from within the script?

After a lot of rummaging on the Web, I found a suitable method in William Shotts' excellent book The Linux Command Line. This article explains the details.

Nothing gives my wife the Screaming Meemies like dates in spreadsheets. Unless she formats the target cell in advance as text, the spreadsheet will turn a perfectly innocent, non-date string like 23/2/6 into '23-Feb-2006'. When she types 6420-11-3, according to both LibreOffice Calc and Gnumeric, she really meant 3 November 6420. And nothing she can do will persuade the spreadsheet to re-format '23-Feb-2006' as 23/2/6. Once a date, always a date. Our house regularly echoes with "I HATE spreadsheets!". But there are workarounds...

elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution that you will either adore or on the other hand, find isn't for you. Fast, tight and favouring beauty and a logical simplicity over the ability to customize every little thing, eOS takes a different approach to many Linux distributions. In this article we shall take a look at elementary OS Freya Beta 1, a preview of the upcoming Freya release.

In a plain-text table, the first or header line usually contains the names of the fields. In this article I've pulled together a variety of ways to add and delete a header, and also how to do things with the rest of the table while leaving the header intact as the first line in the file.

While this is actually cross-platform and not necessarily Linux-specific, there's no doubt many of you out there making use of the awesomeness of XBMC (soon to be known instead as 'Kodi') Media Player would be doing so on the Penguin-powered platform. In this article we look at one of the various, but easiest, ways you can sync your XBMC/Kodi TV and Movie collections and watched status, using trakt.tv.

Test your ingenuity in the first-ever Linux Rain contest, and try your hand at automatic writing! In the weird world of spiritualism, automatic writing is writing by spirits who communicate their messages through a living person (the one holding the pen or pencil). Automatic writing in the digital world means text input without the use of a keyboard or speech-to-text. This kind of input is done rather neatly by the program xvkbd.

This article compares 3 different ways to join tables on a common field. All 3 work OK on small tables, but there's a big difference in speed when the tables to be joined are large, as shown below.

In a previous Linux Rain article I compared different ways to delete blank lines, and showed that the AWK way was the simplest and most thorough. Here I show how to split a text file into multiple text files using a surprisingly simple AWK command.

Over a month ago I embarked on my own personal challenge to use GNOME Shell (otherwise just known as GNOME 3) for an entire week. That week happened and went, I wrote some thoughts I had after that initial week, but did not officially end my usage of the Shell. Fast forward to now... I'm still using GNOME Shell and here's why.