2. Short Tips

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2.1 Moving directories between filesystems. Alan Cox, A.Cox@swansea.ac.uk

Quick way to move an entire tree of files from one disk to another 

(cd /source/directory; tar cf - . ) | (cd /dest/directory; tar xvfp -)

2.2 Pointer to patch for GNU Make 3.70 to change VPATH behavior.Ted Stern, stern@amath.washington.edu

I don't know if many people have this problem, but there is a "feature" of GNU make version 3.70 that I don't like. It is that VPATH acts funny if you give it an absolute pathname. There is an extremely solid patch that fixes this, which you can get from Paul D. Smith <psmith@wellfleet.com>. He also posts the documentation and patch after every revision of GNU make on the newsgroup 'gnu.utils.bug'. Generally, I apply this patch and recompile gmake on every system I have access to.

2.3 How do I stop my system from fscking on each reboot? Dale Lutz, dal@wimsey.com

Q: How do I stop e2fsck from checking my disk every time I boot up.

A: When you rebuild the kernel, the filesystem is marked as 'dirty' and so your disk will be checked with each boot. The fix is to run:

rdev -R /zImage 1

This fixes the kernel so that it is no longer convinced that the filesystem is dirty.

Note: If using lilo, then add read-only to your linux setup in your lilo config file (Usually /etc/lilo.conf)

2.4 How to avoid fscks caused by "device busy" at reboot time. Jon Tombs, jon@gtex02.us.es

If you often get device busy errors on shutdown that leave the filesystem in need of an fsck upon reboot, here is a simple fix:

To /etc/brc or /sbin/brc, add the line 

mount -o remount,ro /mount.dir
for all your mounted filesystems except /, before the call to umount -a. This means if, for some reason, shutdown fails to kill all processes and umount the disks they will still be clean on reboot. Saves a lot of time at reboot for me

2.5 How to print pages with a margin for hole punching. Mike Dickey, mdickey@thorplus.lib.purdue.edu

        #!/bin/sh
        # /usr/local/bin/print
        # a simple formatted printout, to enable someone to
        # 3-hole punch the output and put it in a binder

        cat $1 | pr -t -o 5 -w 85 | lpr

2.6 A way to search through trees of files for a particular regular expression.Raul Deluth Miller, rockwell@nova.umd.edu

I call this script 'forall'. Use it like this: 

forall /usr/include grep -i ioctl
forall /usr/man grep ioctl
Here's forall: 
#!/bin/sh
if [ 1 = `expr 2 \> $#` ]
then
        echo Usage: $0 dir cmd [optargs]
        exit 1
fi
dir=$1
shift
find $dir -type f -print | xargs "$@"

2.7 A script for cleaning up after programs that creat autosave and backup files.Barry Tolnas, tolnas@nestor.engr.utk.edu

Here is a simple two-liner which recursively descends a directory hierarchy removing emacs auto-save (~) and backup (#) files, .o files, and TeX .log files. It also compresses .tex files and README files. I call it 'squeeze' on my system. 

#!/bin/sh
#SQUEEZE removes unnecessary files and compresses .tex and README files
#By Barry tolnas, tolnas@sun1.engr.utk.edu
#
echo squeezing $PWD
find  $PWD \( -name \*~ -or -name \*.o -or -name \*.log -or -name \*\#\) -exec
rm -f {} \;
find $PWD \( -name \*.tex -or -name \*README\* -or -name \*readme\* \) -exec gzip -9 {} \;

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