the reality tunnel

There are some interesting backup tools for system backups (Time Machine) but I want to just be able to copy and verify a directory (and its children).  I’ve heard that the commercial product Retrospect provides copy and verify functionality, but I’m cheap.
This is the method that I used.  I’d be interested on hearing feedback about [...]

I was having trouble SSHing into my workstation.  It would just hang at the login.  I was worried that I had gotten 0wn3d.  I logged in at the console and ran top and saw that there were a bunch of runaway imapfilter proccesses from my cron runs.
I ran imapfilter from the command line and got [...]

This is old news to a lot of folks, but new and powerful to me.
Search for text in files and move matching files

$ grep –files-with-matches –null foo * | xargs –null -I xxx mv xxx dir_for_foos/

The above command searches for the string foo in all files in the current subdirectory.  It then moves each file [...]

I’ve been using the unix screen command a lot lately, and enough to want to learn more.
I used to just scroll through windows with CTRL-a n and CTRL-a p, but now I have a ton of windows in my screen session, so I want to be able to navigate easier.

List to windows: CTRL-a w (you [...]