(Asked in 2011)

sometimes cp is better than dd

Most vi users should probably know the basics of ed/ex

From ESR's The Art of Unix Programming

Modeling transistors and logic gates with Unix pipes.

I feel like I end up reading this once a year, usually when I'm trying to write a [python] script that needs to run from a cron script without clobbering its own files if one instance is started before the previous one is finished.

See also my shelfcache Python3 package which provides a thread- and multiprocess-safe key-value caching store on top of the standard library's shelve module: https://github.com/cristoper/shelfcache

Tips for using fzf, ripgrep, and bfs for quickly finding files based on their names/contents.

A weblog about simple, useful software.

Hasn't been updated since 27 July 2016. I hope Jack returns at some point.

A very handy overview and comparison of the various file-locking mechanisms available on Unix systems (includes Linux 3.15's "open file description locks").

On the futility of Unix file locks (especially on networked file systems).

Note that Linux 3.15 introduced "open file description locks" to fcntl, which combines the semantics of BSD flock (lock associated with open file) with the record-locking and NFS-compatibility of fcntl. That solves everything except for portability.