Three dear old Linux commands that we should forget

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mount: mount is, of course, a fundamental command. But don’t use in “ls mode” to list the current mounts. You’ll get a lot of gibberish, and the command is not designed for that.

Use findmnt instead.

nslookup is deprecated – or almost.

Use host for simple things, and dig for more information.

Notice, however, that all these commands query the DNS directly, instead of going through /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/hosts (as the programs that ask use the OS system calls will). If you want a “real” ip resolver, use either getent hosts [IP/NAME] or resolveip (the later comes with the msyql server!).

You should quit using ifconfig.

Get used to ip,  it’s much better.

Understanding Nginx location rules

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Ningx is slim and the configuration feels in many respects less bloated than Apache. But it’s also a little idiosyncratic, and the official documentation, still, is not great. I keep forgetting about the location rules, so here’s an attempt to make my own cheatsheet.

A location block applies some configuraton by matching against a request URI. A location can be one of these five types:

 nginx

(The official documentation, among other things, calls “prefix” the type identifier string ( =,^*,~,~*); this can be confusing, because we are also speaking (in cases 2.a 2.b) of “prefix matching” …)

Important: among the list of location blocks inside a server, only one will be picked (or none). The only way to “compose” settings is by using nested locations.

Trying syntax higlighters…

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I’m testing several of the many syntax higlighter plugins for posting code in WordPress… This is a nice list. All are impressive, but after trying the first five, I’m liking most Crayon Syntax Highlighter. I love the extensive customization (including styles, like font sizes); on the minus side, the docs are rather caothic with (currently) many broken links and images. Another slight objection could be that it formats (by default) all <pre> elements.