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GEC Palakkad: The main building inauguration by Ho...

Is it true? Yes, it’s. The roars of students have pierced into the deaf ears of Kerala Govt at last and the dream is becoming true on February 16th, 2010. The latest news from college is that the main building will be inaugurated by Honorable Chief Minister of Kerala, Sri. V. S. Achuthanandan on Feb 16th. Invitation: The above picture was taken a few months back. Unfortunately, I don’t have the latest pictures...
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apropos: search the whatis database for strings or...

Did you ever sweat as you couldn’t find which commands deal with particular keywords? All linux users know they can get complete details about a command/system call from man pages. But, what if you don’t know the command? Yes, you can use apropos in such a situation . apropos searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard...
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Linux: fork() system call with an example...

fork() creates a child process that differs from the parent process only in its PID and PPID, and in the fact that resource utilizations are set to 0. File locks and pending signals are not inherited. Under Linux, fork() is implemented using copy-on-write pages, so the only penalty that it incurs is the time and memory required to duplicate the parent’s page tables, and to create a unique task structure for the child. RETURN...
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Awk FS (Input Field Separator), OFS (Output Field ...

I would like to explain a simple behavior by awk that I noticed while writing a script. #!/bin/awk -f BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS="-"; } { $2=""; print } Give this script the password file, it will delete the password field, but leave everything else the same after changing output field separating to hyphen(-). This works fine, but OFS won’t be effective if you remove the...
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Linux Time Fields: Access (atime), Modify (mtime),...

Linux saves 3 different time fields per file in inode. They are access, modify and change time and you can use stat command to get them. As far I know, Linux never stores file creation time (for good or bad, I doubt ). Some guys are not sure about the difference between modify and change time. As I study mostly from man pages, I’m pasting relevant sections from the man page for stat system call. man -s 2 stat time_t...
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ptmx and pts – pseudo-terminal master and sl...

NAME ptmx and pts – pseudo-terminal master and slave DESCRIPTION The file /dev/ptmx is a character file with major number 5 and minor number 2, usually of mode 0666 and owner.group of root.root. It is used to create a pseudo-terminal master and slave pair. When a process opens /dev/ptmx, it gets a file descriptor for a pseudo-terminal master (PTM), and a pseudo-terminal slave (PTS) device is created in the /dev/pts...
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MySQL Database Backup Programs: mysqldump and mysq...

There are two built-in database backup programs available for MySQL, mysqldump and mysqlhotcopy. Read below to know the difference between them. The mysqldump can be used to dump a database or a collection of databases for backup or for transferring the data to another SQL server (not necessarily a MySQL server). The dump contains SQL statements to create the table or populate it, or both. If you are doing a backup on...
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