1/14    Why is NULL defined to be "0" in C++ instead of "((void *) 0)" like in
        C?  I have some overloaded functtions where one takes an integer
        parameter and the other a pointer parameter.  When I call it with
        "NULL", the compiler matches it with the integer version instead of
        the pointer version which is a problem.  Other funny effect is that
        sizeof(NULL) is different from sizeof(myPtr).  Thanks.
	...

4/04    Is there a good way to diff 2 files that consist of columns of
        floating point numbers, such that it only tells me if there's a
        difference if the numbers on a given line differ by at least a given
        ratio?  Say, 1%?
        \_ Use Excel.
           1. Open foo.txt in Excel.  It should convert all numbers to cells in
	...

4/29    Why were C and Java designed to require "break;" statements for a
        "case" section to terminate rather than falling-through to the next
        section?  99% of the time poeple want a "case" section to terminate.
        In fact some compilers issue warning if there is no "break;" statement
        in a "case" section.  Why not just design the languages to have
        termination as the default behavior, and provide a "fallthru;"
	...

7/19    In C or C++, how do I write the code of a function with variable
        number of parameters in order to pass the variable parameters to
        another function that also has variable number of parameters?  Thanks.
        \_ The usual way (works on gcc 3.0+, Visual Studio 2005+):
               #define foo(fmt, ...) printf(fmt, ##__VA_ARGS__)
           The cool new way (works on gcc 4.3+):
	...

3/7     I have a C question.  I have the following source code in two identical
        files t.c and t.cpp:
                #include <stdlib.h>
                int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
                  const char * const * p1;
                  const char * * p2;
	...

2/4     random C programming/linker fu question.  If I have
        int main() { printf("%s is at this adddr %p\n", "strlen", strlen); }
        and soda's /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space is 2 (eg; on)
        why is strlen (or any other libc fn) at the same address every time?
        \_ I don't pretend to actually know the right answer to this, but
           could it have something to do with shared libraries?
	...

2/12    I need a way to make a really big C++ executable (~200MBs) that does
        nothing.  No static initialization either.  Any ideas?
        \_ static link in lots of libraries?
        \_ #define a   i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0;
           #define b   a a a a a a a a a a
           #define c   b b b b b b b b b b
	...

9/28    http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
        Java is #1!!! Followed by C, PHP, C++, Visual Basic, Perl,
        C#, Python, Javascript, then finally Ruby. The good news is
        Pascal is going waaaay back up!
        \_ C is still more popular than C++?  I feel much better about myself
           now.
	...

8/6     In C one can do "typedef int my_index_t;".  What's the equivalent in
        C#?  Thanks.
        \_ C#? Are you serious? Is this what the class of 2009 learn?
           \_ No.  I have to learn .NET code at work.  I am Class of '93.
           \_ python is what 2009 learns, see the motd thread about recent
              cal courses and languages
	...

7/20    For those who care btw, it looks like eclipse is now A Standard Tool
        at UCB ugrad cs, probably replaced emacs.  Furthermore, people get
        angry at seeing Makefiles, (since eclispe takes care of that).  I
        guess it's just a sign of the times.
        \_ The more people at my work use eclipse the less the code is
           managable in emacs.  I'm not sure which application's fault
	...

4/27    I wrote a little shell script to collect iostat data:
        #!/bin/bash
        DATE=`date +%m%d`
        DATADIR=/var/tmp/user
        OUTPUTFILE=$DATADIR/$DATE.out
        while true
	...

5/8     Hello everyone!  This is Josh Hawn, CSUA Tech VP for Spring 2012.
        About 2 weeks ago, someone brought to my attention that our script
        to periodically merge /etc/motd.public into /etc/motd wasn't
        running.  When I looked into it, the cron daemon was running, but
        there hadn't been any root activity in the log since April 7th.  I
        looked into it for a while, but got lost in other things I was
	...

10/24  What's an easy way to see if say column 3 of a file matches a list of
       expressions in a file? Basically I want to combine "grep -f <file>"
       to store the patterns and awk's $3 ~ /(AAA|BBB|CCC)/ ... I realize
       I can do this with "egrep -f " and use regexp instead of strings, but
       was wondering if there was some magic way to do this.
       \_ UNIX has no magic. Make a shell script to produce the ask or egrep
	...

7/29    Happy Sysadmin Day
        \_ our "sysadmin" today deleted /home. When we asked her why
           she said she didn't do it. When I checked the sudo logs,
           I found these two commands in order:
               COMMAND=/bin/rm -r /home testuser
               COMMAND=/bin/rm -r /home/testuser
	...

5/19    If script A runs, and calls script B ..... is it possible for me to exit\
        script A based on results of script B and not continue?
        \_ assume any shell
        \_ Yes.
           \_ without passing the result to some stupid temp file?
              \_ It sounds like you want "scriptb || exit", which will run
	...

4/22    In Linux is there an easy way to rename the scripts in /etc/rc?.d ?
        For example I want to set all the /etc/rc?.d/S91apache to S100apache
        so that it'll run the ramdisk BEFORE going to apache.
        \_ Sure, just move them.
           \_ I mean is there a script that will rename all of them
              for me? Like: setrc apache2 0 0 1 1 1 1
	...

10/27   http://www.maxgames.com/play/flash-mind-reader.html
        how does this work?
        \_ sh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-(\
$i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
        \_ bash -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j\
-($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
	...

8/18    Hi again, new freebsd guy here again, in bash I was able to go
        LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/foo/lib ./runmyapp
        I managed to do this in tcsh by using setenv in a shell script
        that setenv's the lib path and then executes $1, just wondering
        if there was a way to do it in 1 line from the cmd line as in bash?
        Thanks, btw %2c or %3c worked.  Freebsd, tcsh and vi forever!
	...

5/5     Is there a good (or standard) way to make an offline copy of a w
        ordpress blog (mine, not someone else's)? tia.
        \_ oh man.
           \_ I could cobble something together with curl / wget, but I'd
              rather not if there is a standard way of doing this.  I'm
              pretty new to wordpress / blogging and I just want to keep
	...

2/10    I have an sh file that does a mount.. the mount does an
        authentication. I previosly stored the username and password
        from zenity prompts. However, I can't get a return on the password
        field. The following only works on the username:
        mount -t davfs "http://blahblah.com/BLahUser11" /mountdir << EOF
        ${username}
	...

1/13    I want to extract a couple integer from an xml file, mainly,
        xml file from http://weather.com so I can put it on my xplanet marker
        file. has anyone done similar things (parse and extract data
        from xml) using shell script instead of python/perl?
        in the world of perl, it make sense to dump things into a hash
        which i can easily extract key/value pair.  can i achieve similar
	...

12/18   Campus USENET service will be terminated on 12/31.
        http://ls.berkeley.edu/mail/micronet/2008/1608.html
        \_ I emailed RobR to tell him. -ausman
        \_ The CSUA is considering asking campus to allow us to run NNTP for
           ucb.class.*, as bSpace sucks major major ass. Thoughts? --t
           \_ That's noble, but maybe the effort would be better spent
	...