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 .

If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinkingabout what you're writing in prompts and questions in software.Also interesting is a followup entry on whyeveryone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball .)

Here's a brief history and explanation of how cut and paste works in theX Windows system (to give it its formal name), prompted by this blogentry withthe entirely reasonable gripe that selecting something in a program andthen exiting the program causes the selection to disappear.

There are two separate cut and paste mechanisms in X, from two separateeras: the cut buffer and selections.The cut buffer is the older mechanism, and works by having programs storethe cut data into an X property on the