Tricks

Finding Leaf Packages Faster: Optimization for In-degree Computation in Dependency Graph

15 minutes to read

Dependency is a concept that appears often in software engineering. In the previous article for my GSoC project, I discussed build systems and package managers, both of which apply the concept of dependencies. A build system usually allows programmers to define different tasks in building a project and let each of them depend on other tasks, hence dependency relationships are established. A package manager supports declaration of package dependency relationships, or else it is not a good package manager. …

Use grep as a Substitute for cat

4 minutes to read

I came across a fascinating and educative article, Unix Recovery Legend, when someone posted a link to it on Reddit. The article presents a story of the writer, Mario Wolczko, and some other colleagues attempting to recover a system partially destructed by rm -rf /. The rm command was interrupted before it scraped off directories like /usr, but it was too late to save /bin, /dev and /etc, which were respectively the directory for basic executable programs, device files, and system configuration files. …