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Welcome to the first special weekend edition of Tool of the day (totd).

This special is about the most needed tools for any unix user, novice or expert alike.

At the end of my first totd I pointed you to the man or manual page for ls.
The 'on-line reference manuals' or man pages as they are commonly refered to are available for most, if not all, common *nix tools.

The most common way to use these is to just type man command.
A better way is to use man section command in this way you are sure to get the correct page.
Sections:
1   Executable programs or shell commands
2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
6   Games
7   Miscellaneous  (including  macro  packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
9   Kernel routines [Non standard]

There are a lot of options to man, see: man man but you'll proppably never need to use them..
One of the options you might need to use is the -a or --all option will show all pages matching your query, not just the first.

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After yesterdays feature rich tool, today an easy one..
You might know the standard syntax.
~$ mv source destination
But there are some more tricks mv can do..

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The first in this series, tool of the day..
This is perhaps the most important and common command there is on any unix system..
~$ ls
Well that just shows us a list of files and folders in your current working dir.
It might be coloured, it might be plain..
That all depends on your ls version and some enviroment variables we'll get into later..
~$ ls --version
ls (coreutils) 5.2.1
Written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.

Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The most common uses is ls (options) file(or folder).
Don't forget that you can use wildcards (*) with ls like most commands.

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A new category here at int main ( void ) tool of the day..

I'll start out tomorrow.
Am allready makeing a queue for the comming days..
I'll try to place an item here every day with some info on a command or tool..
There are so many GNU tools that I think I can do this for years to come..

I'll start with the GNU coreutils and slowly make my way thrue to more obscure commands and tools..

If you have suggestions for tools or commands to cover or perhaps have a story for this part of the site, feel free to use the comment feature..

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http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006

THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

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There is a problem with the laptop..
After the initial blue screen which complained about the ntoskrnl.exe (that's all my wife remembered as she rebooted), the computer starts with the 'running bar' Windows XP logo screen, after about two seconds you see a blue flash so fast you can't read anything before it reboots again..
All the options in the boot menu (safe mode, safe mode +, safe mode ++, last known good configuration etc) have the same result..

It's not a hardware (harddrive) problem.. It's a dual boot and I let Slackware Linux do some crunching (cd /usr/src/linux && make clean && make) on the hdd and there are no problems there..

The only thing I got with the laptop was a recovery DVD (which I can't find btw), but that's a 'ghost' image so it would destroy any changes made..

I don't want to do that.

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By now you should have heard about the wmf exploits for Windows.
First seen by me December 23th on an obscure pr0n site.
Saved it, examined it (on a GNU/Linux machine), I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do untill the vulnerability in Windows was made public December 28 by Microsoft.

But Microsoft finaly updated it and put it on the frontpage yesterday.
Customers who follow safe browsing best practices are not likely to be compromised by any exploitation of the WMF vulnerability. Users should take care not to visit unfamiliar or un-trusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code.
A patch they promis will be released January 10.
 
Ah.. So it's our own fault for surfing to 'unsafe' sites if we get infected in the mean time..
Whatever happened to Where do you want to go today?
Or the new slogan Start something new
I do like: Get more from your home PC than ever before.
So true..

I'm still laughing about the 10 reasons to install SP2..
1. Help protect your PC from harmful attachments.
2. Improve your privacy when you're on the Web.
3. Avoid potentially unsafe downloads.
6. Take control of your security settings.
9. Take action against crashes caused by browser add-ons.
.. to reduce the potential for crashes and enjoy a more trouble-free browsing experience.

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