I have a data-entry script which adds records to a plain-text data table. It's a fairly complicated script with a GUI dialog, and until recently it added one record at a time. To add another record, I had to launch the script again. Was there a simple way (I asked myself) to re-run the script, or…

Nothing gives my wife the Screaming Meemies like dates in spreadsheets. Unless she formats the target cell in advance as text, the spreadsheet will turn a perfectly innocent, non-date string like 23/2/6 into '23-Feb-2006'. When she types 6420-11-3, according to both LibreOffice Calc and Gnumeric,…

elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution that you will either adore or on the other hand, find isn't for you. Fast, tight and favouring beauty and a logical simplicity over the ability to customize every little thing, eOS takes a different approach to many Linux distributions. In this article we…

In a plain-text table, the first or header line usually contains the names of the fields. In this article I've pulled together a variety of ways to add and delete a header, and also how to do things with the rest of the table while leaving the header intact as the first line in the file. Add a…

While this is actually cross-platform and not necessarily Linux-specific, there's no doubt many of you out there making use of the awesomeness of XBMC (soon to be known instead as 'Kodi') Media Player would be doing so on the Penguin-powered platform. In this article we look at one of the various,…

Released on the 25th of August 2014, The Journey Down: Chapter Two is the second installment in The Journey Down video game series, a classic point and click adventure inspired by much-loved classic titles such as Grim Fandango. Described as having a "Afro-Caribbean vibe", a quick look at…

Automatic writing We didn't get any responses to our September contest, but contributions will always be welcome in the comments section, below. Readers were invited to use the command-line version of the virtual keyboard program xvkbd to create ingenious examples of automatic writing — writing…

This article compares 3 different ways to join tables on a common field. All 3 work OK on small tables, but there's a big difference in speed when the tables to be joined are large, as shown below. Table joining isn't something you need to do if you store data in a simple, flat-file database like a…

You might have noticed that The Linux Rain has taken on a whole new look. If you had of tried the beta version of The Linux Rain the new look would look very familiar. So, are we now running a whole new shiny CMS (content management system)? Well, not quite. Not yet anyway. Here's why. It's a whole…

In a previous Linux Rain article I compared different ways to delete blank lines, and showed that the AWK way was the simplest and most thorough. Here I show how to split a text file into multiple text files using a surprisingly simple AWK command. Background In 2013 I published an article in Free…

Over a month ago I embarked on my own personal challenge to use GNOME Shell (otherwise just known as GNOME 3) for an entire week. That week happened and went, I wrote some thoughts I had after that initial week, but did not officially end my usage of the Shell. Fast forward to now... I'm still…