There's a lot of Unix idioms that I use often enough to have turnedinto little shell scripts. Here's the first of them; I call it howmany :

#!/bin/shtrap '' 13sort "$@" | uniq -c | sort -nr

(The trap is necessary because of a Linux bash issue .)

Howmany does what its name says: it counts up how many times each lineof its standard input appears, then shows them from most to leastfrequent

Xiostat is the program I wrote to giveus a faithful recounting of the Linux kernel's disk IO stats after we discovered the problems with iostat's numbers . I've now finally gotten around to putting it up on theweb and making a page that explains how to run itand what its output means and so on.

The current version is a bit slapdash, but I have verified that it(still) works on bog standard 2.6 Linux kernels (and thus should work onDebian Sarge,

The fun and charm of URL quoting is that you need to do it twice .Differently. That's because there's two different entities involved:browsers and web servers.

Strictly speaking, about the only thing that you have to quote forthe browser is quote characters, because otherwise your nice comes out very confusing. If you are being a good web standards monkeyyou need to quote at least ampersands (&'s) as well, because otherwisethe

This week, we:

• got 12,551 messages from 234 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,960 sessions from 979 different IP addresses.
• received 444,512 connections from at least 44,262 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once; 50 is themaximum number allowed.

Mail received and SMTP session volume is down a bit from last week , but connection volume has spiked to huge