Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Is on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during a week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 12 Comments
Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • An analogy:

    My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.

    It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.

    I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.


  • xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

    e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

    You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.



  • You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

    For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

    Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

    Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

    Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

    Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

    That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.


  • This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

    At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

    Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.





  • ^S for unprompted save is in the default keybinds, not that I could say when it was added. (Pretty sure it wasn’t a pico thing, but that leaves quite a bit of time unaccounted for.)

    Muscle memory for other editors kicked in when I was editing something and did a literal slow realisation and double-take when it worked.

    Now if only I could stop pressing ^W in Firefox to use nano’s “whereis” to find something that’d be great.

    For those unaware, it closes the current tab. Or the whole browser. Ugh.


  • Yep. When I was migrating, I saw some advice to avoid Lemmy on account of its provenance, which is how I ended up on Kbin instead.

    Unfortunately, it’s not going well on the original instance (getting in before “how’s that working out for you”), but for reasons very different to lemmy.ml.

    Still don’t have a lemmy account, but I am, for my sins, subscribed to communities there. Like this one.