Mastering Vim: Opening files

I think every *NIX admin knows this little gem – the Vi or Vim (Vi Improved) text editor. While the origin vi was written by Billy Joy, vim was cloned, improved and released in 1991 by Bram Moolenaar. In the blog series Mastering Vim, I’d like to show you some tips & tricks.

Ansible Modules – shell vs. command

In the Ansible Core are a lot of Ansible modules included for almost all use cases. On this page are all modules listed and described with the available options and some examples. Some Ansible modules are on the first view quite similar and can be used for the same purpose, but often are there some crucial […]

Compare command outputs with process substitution

Every sysadmin knows the situation, if he has to compare the output of some commands. Most of us save the output of the commands in a temporary file, compares these files with the diff binary and afterwards delete the temporary files. In this blog post I’ll show you the usage of process substitution to get the differences of commands […]

Display my actual used shell

Here a short blog post… if you work in several companies or with different accounts, it’s useful to know, which shell you’re currently using (not the default shell from /etc/passwd). Of course, you can simply change the shell and choose your favorite one, but if you just want to know the actual shell, you can run […]

zsh tips: File picking

When you’re working on your shell, you immediately get in contact with files, directories and therefor paths. Most of the time there are simple paths, but sometimes it gets exciting and you need to defined multiple files. Instead of defining them manually on the shell, you can work with placeholders in form of asterisks.

zsh tips: Auto completion & correction

When it comes to the amount of work to achieve a desired result, I’m kind of a lazy person. I like my workflows to be optimised, and I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts. Everything in my shell (zsh, tmux), editor (vim, SublimeText) and operating system (Linux, OS X) needs to be keyboard optimised for fast access.

zsh: A shell on steroids

I’m a good old fashioned Linux guy, moving towards my 30 years. When you start working with Linux, you come in contact with a terminal sooner or later, and therefor a shell. Most Linux distribution used bash as the default shell, and most of them still use it today.