There is a persistent belief, held by a large assortment of even fairlyexperienced people, that Unix files have a creation time. They don't.

The belief generally arises because one of the three times that allUnix files have is called ctime , going along with mtime and atime .However, the 'c' stands for 'change', not 'creation'; an inode's ctime is updated more or less any time various data fields in the inode itselfare changed.

(The exact details of

One of the cornerstones of my X setup is an xterm feature that a lot ofpeople probably haven't heard of: -ziconbeep . The manpage explanationis too long and obscure to quote, so I'll summarize: if an iconified(aka minimized) xterm with -ziconbeep gets output, it puts ' *** ' atthe front of its title (technically only the icon name) and optionallybeeps. (When you de-minimize the xterm, the title addition goes away.)

This probably

It's easy in awk to get fields counting from the start of a line;the first field is $1 , the second field is $2 , and so on. Butperiodically I'm not interested in fields at the start of the line, I'minterested in a field at the end of the line; it's much easier to seethat it's the third-last field than to carefully count how many fieldsit is from the start.

(And sometimes you have a

One of the important skills for Unix programming is the ability to parsemanpages carefully. This is not as easy as it looks, because manpagesare traditionally written in a style where everything is important andyou have to think carefully about the implications of the exact wordingused.

(This can be useful for other things than Unix manpages, since a lot ofspecifications are written in the same style.)

For example, today I was emailed a comment on my Pythonsocket module irritation entry pointing out the existence of the .