About

Let’s be frank here: I am not an expert — I am, in fact, far from being one (otherwise, I won’t need this blog, don’t you see?). I am just a happy user of *nix-based systems. Most of the things that I put here are from the various Linux community posts. All these communities are rich with information — but the problem (for me, at least) is that often it takes me a long time to find out something which I figured out/ dug up long ago. And, that’s the motivation for starting the blog — so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel!

Well, just to put things in perspective: I have a PhD in  theoretical and computational chemistry and am currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in a similar field (meaning I am a frequent user of *nix systems). I have two distributions of linux, namely OpenSuse and Xubuntu, installed on my four year old Windows box and a Macbook with Darwin installed, besides the Red Hat servers that I work on in the university. The reason for telling you about these is that there is a need for me to keep up with the command line tricks to stay productive. But the real reason may be that I love to play with these systems.

Just to reiterate what I said in my first post: I am going to list the tricks that I come across while working on these crazy (in a good sense, of course!) systems. However, this is not meant to be a guidebook for anybody but myself. But if you find the tricks useful — great! If you have any suggestions or know a better trick then let us all know.

I did not “invent” any of the stuff. It may happen that I came up with a novel idea of doing things better myself sometimes, but most of the time, I  have just collected stuff in my “notebook” for my own use; and in all the cases I have cited the relevant sources. Since I am not running this blog for money, I think that it’s OK with the owners of the sources from which I borrowed stuff. In case if you find something is not OK, then please do let me know (kousikonline AT gmail DOT com) so that I can remove/ rewrite the post.