Tanguy Ortolo

Sometimes, you have to use ZIP archives, or worse, RAR archives (curse them!), with one significant annoyance: zip, unzip, rar and unrar use a rather uncommon command line convention, compared to the usual tar, cpio and pax.

Read more One archiver to rule them all: bsdtar

Silly question: when you use diff(1) to produce a file to be applied with patch(1), do you call the result a diff or a patch? Do you name it foo.diff or foo.patch?

FAT

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

exFAT

Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.

Read more Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks

… is that you cannot use funny desktop programs such as Xsnow or XPenguins. :-(

Read more The drawback with tiling window managers…

Did you ever use a tool such as netcat, which has no history and does not allow you to edit the line you are typing?

% nc localhost smtp
220 cocorico.example.com ESMTP Postfix
HELO localhost
250 cocorico.example.com
MAIL FROM: <tanguy@localhost>
250 2.1.0 Ok
RCTP TO: <tanguy@localhost>
502 5.5.2 Error: command not recognized
^[[A Sh*t, line recall does not work!
502 5.5.2 Error: command not recognized

Read more rlwrap: give readline super powers to any command line tool