Miaou Moon is an unusual platformer styled game. On the one hand, it's an almost hypnotic and patient adventure through space as you let yourself bounce around through low gravity while conserving energy. On the other hand, you'll suddenly find yourself using cleverly timed thrusts to avoid a…

Recently I was checking for unmatched braces in a big text file with nearly half a million lines (300+ MB). Was there a closing brace for every opening brace? The text file was called 'beetle' and was actually a tab-separated table with each line divided into 77 fields. What I wanted to do was find…

Flags in AWK are variables which are set to either true or false. They're handy for defining ranges over which AWK can act, as shown below. The AWK used here is GNU AWK 4.1.1 (gawk 4). Sometimes flags aren't needed I'll demonstrate with a simple text file called demo, which has 6 lines with 3…

We recently did a little article on Canonical's "Snappy" system, also known as Snaps, and it's usefulness for testing new and updated software without breaking your existing installations or versions of that specific software. Akin to Upstart vs systemd, Red Hat also have their own slice…

If you've been following the latest Ubuntu news around the traps, you've probably heard about Canonical's "Snappy" system. We actually did an article on Snappy back in late 2014 when the project had just started to surface. As of the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release, the core program…

Lexical illusions are very hard to find when proofreading. The most common lexical illusion is a duplicated word, as in this well-known example: A lexical illusion: many people are not aware that the the brain will automatically ignore a second instance of the word 'the' when it starts a new line. …

Swapping the rows and columns in a table on the command line would seem to be a fairly easy thing to do. For example, with this tab-separated table (called 'tabbed') as input: get this tab-separated table ('swapped') as output: Datamash Transposing rows and columns is indeed easy if you have the…

One thing that's probably obvious to anyone who's read more than a few Linux Rain articles is that we appreciate the CLI (command-line interface). Graphical programs and utilities are great and there are some fantastic examples of those out there, not to mention new ones being created all the time.…

Unless you've lived under a virtual rock since 2003, you have probably heard of Linden Lab's baby, Second Life at some point. The online virtual world, where you can literally pretty much do anything, might not be at the peak popularity it once experienced but there is still plenty going on. If…

Backreferences are part of the complicated and sometimes confusing world of regular expressions. The basic idea is this: you can substitute any part of a regular expression with a backslash followed by a number, so long as you surround the part to be substituted with round brackets. The command…

Most people store and organise their personal emails as individual files (messages) in folders. Those folders might be on a webmail company's servers, or in a mail client program on the user's personal computer. In both cases the emails are probably in a special email format. I'm horribly…