Displaying posts filed under

Unix

Jan
18
2010
BSD, Software, Unix By cliff | No comments yet

Upgraded Dovecot on FreeBSD and Sieve stopped working (Fixed)

I recently upgraded Dovecot (1.1x to 1.2(.8)) on FreeBSD (7.2) and had a slew of issues.
Postfix wasn’t delivering messages
This was because Dovecot wasn’t starting and Postfix couldn’t get the SASL connection that it needed. The fix was to upgrade/install both dovecot and dovecot-sieve ( I use Dovecot’s deliver as my Local Delivery Agent (LDA) ). [...]

Nov
17
2009
Apple, BSD, Code, GNU, Linux, OS X, Scripting, Unix By cliff | 2 comments

one .profile to rule them all

I got sick of having to try to copy and make major modifications for each environment that I was in. As a consultant I sometimes have to deal with ridiculous policy driven constraints as to what software I can or cannot use. Sometimes it’s simply ignorance (like when the CTO of a company said that I could only script in a “…standard shell like BASH…” nothing obscure like KSH) but what ever the case it’s a pain when you’ve grown accustom to something as personal as your shell settings. Now I have a solution.

Nov
7
2009
Code, Scripting, Unix By cliff | No comments yet

Shell tricks: eval helps make dynamic scripting rock.

If you write shell scripts of any significant size, eval is a very good command to understand (well). It can make some code simpler, other code obsolete, and yet other code it makes possible that would not be otherwise.
What is eval?
According to the 2004 IEEE Std. 1003.1:

eval constructs commands by concatenating arguments.

The example given on [...]

Oct
24
2009
Code, GNU, Gripes, Linux, Scripting, Unix By cliff | No comments yet

why I don’t write BASH scripts

I’m constantly hounded by GNU/Linux newbies GNUbies about many things relative to scripting; Why don’t I use gawk for my awk scripts; Why don’t I use ‘[[’ instead of ‘[’ for my condition tests in shell scripts; Why don’t I use BASH for my shell scripts?. Such questions rarely come from seasoned UNIX professionals who have worked on multiple flavors of Unix. Explaining the way things work in the real world requires that the audience has an attention span beyond that of the averageI’m_pissed_at_society_and_microsoft_sucks-linux-neophyte.

Jun
27
2009
Code, Lua, Unix By cliff | 9 comments

LUA_PATH on OSX

Earlier today I was playing around with Lua and luarocks on my laptop (which happens to be a MacBook Pro). I thought maybe I’d try re-writing telechat in Lua with the LuaSocket package. After I’d installed Lua 5.1.4 via mac ports along with luarocks:
$ sudo port -v install lua luarocks
I installed LuaSocket.
$ sudo luarocks install [...]