In any programming language, idioms may be used that may not seem obvious from reading the manual. Often these usages of the language represent ways to make your code more compact (as in requiring ...

Techniques so absurdly simple, you'll curse all the code you wrote without them.

There are quite a few exit codes used on Linux systems, though no listing you can display when you’re feeling curious. In fact, you won’t see the numeric codes unless you specifically ask for them.

It certainly isn’t a new idea to compile a language into an intermediate language. The original C++ compiler outputs C code, for example. Enhanced versions of Fortran were often just conversions of ...

I'm taking the road less traveled.

A reader wrote me this week that his bash scripts were complaining “out of memory”; what should he do? It didn’t take long to get him moving again. While my colleague Sandra Henry-Stocker usually ...