The PHP interpreter supports running it in interactive mode by using the –interactive (short equivalent: -a) command-line switch. Running an interactive PHP shell can be useful when you need to quickly try code snippets. But, for this mode to be fully functional, PHP has to be compiled with readline support. Unfortunately, on CentOS PHP has [...]

RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use [...]

I finally made the decision to upgrade WordPress to the latest 2.3.1 version. I skipped the initial v2.3 release as I had read that there was a lengthy list of bugs about that release, which eventually have been fixed in 2.3.1. Everything seems to run smoothly. I intend to spend some time browsing around my [...]

This article describes how to use the command line download managers wget and curl in order to download files from your Rapidshare Premium account.

Midnight Commander (MC) is a lean, but powerful, two-panel file manager that, admittedly, promotes productivity while working from a console. Among other features, it implements a user menu with pre-defined actions that can be performed on the selected files or directories. This menu can be further customized by the user on a directory-, user- or [...]

This is an interesting article by O’Reilly Hacks, which provides tips on how to watch a video stream in ASCII art. From the article: Good ASCII art can take time and talent to look just right, but you can skip through that effort with AAlib, a library devoted to converting any image into an ASCII [...]

Generally, the only reason for which you may need to create a bootable Windows CD is when you have updated the operating system installation files with the latest Service Pack (slipstream). Even in this case, chances are that most users will rather use standard windows software to create the bootable CDs than mkisofs under Linux, [...]

Reading a man page using a terminal application is easy, but I doubt if it would ever win a convenience award. Sometimes, it is necessary to print the man page. I can recommend two ways of doing this.

I guess that every single *nix user, at least once, has run across files with the *.run or *.bin extensions. These scripts are usually software installers and are widely used to distribute, but not limited to, proprietary software to the Unix world. Examples are the popular NVidia or ATI display drivers for Linux and other [...]

The Slack World, a Slackware related online magazine has published a very good write-up about how to create a chroot environment. Tom Newsom writes in his article: In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and [...]