syntax Archives - The Silicon Underground

Xxcopy vs Robocopy

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 12:00:13 +0000

Part of being a system administrator is copying large quantities of files around, for any number of reasons. The traditional command line tools for this, Copy and Xcopy, have some limitations. For this reason, two companies extended Xcopy: Microsoft, with

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XCOPY vs ROBOCOPY

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 11:00:19 +0000

XCOPY vs ROBOCOPY: Which do you like? If you’re a command line jockey, both Windows tools have their place. Here’s how I decide when to use which one. Note: If you’re looking for a comparison of Robocopy and the third-party

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Origin of CP/M’s PIP command

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:00:58 +0000

CP/M was, as you probably know, the first popular microcomputer operating system. It was good but imperfect, and its cryptic command for copying files, PIP, is often cited as an example. Copy makes sense. Even the Unix equivalent, cp, makes sense–it’s

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Shakespearean surprises

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:39:45 +0000

This oft-cited story about Shakespeare’s wealth and how he got it in the Telegraph led me–as the Internet often does–to something else: Shakespeare as therapy. Brain scans indicate that reading the unfamiliar language and complex syntax in classical writing such

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Use Apachebench to test your webserver optimizations

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:18:05 +0000

If your web server is slow and you want to fix it, it’s nice to be able to quantify what you got. Enter Apachebench, which is part of Apache and probably already on your server. The Apachebench caveat Usage is

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Writing clearly vs. concisely

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:11:32 +0000

I had a disagreement last week with a technical writer who argues that a sentence should always have as few words as possible. No exceptions, for no reason. I don’t agree. In some ways, this comes down to a disagreement

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My poor-man’s SSD boots DOS really fast

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:23:45 +0000

So, my no-name compact flash adapters arrived today. I ripped one open like a kid at Christmas, pulled a PC off the scrap heap, yanked my 128 MB compact flash card out of my PDA, and went to town.

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Meet Robocopy

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:26:50 +0000

If you remember the days of DOS, you know the difference between COPY and XCOPY. For those times when XCOPY won't cut it, there's ROBOCOPY, part of the Windows resource kit.

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Any Unix gurus care to help me with mod_rewrite?

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 13:53:00 +0000

I've watched my search engine traffic decrease steadily for the past few months since I changed blogging software. It seems most engines don't care much for the super-long arguments this software passes in its URLs.

The solution is mod_rewrite, and I think my syntax looks correct, but it's not working for me.

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FTE – a DOS-style editor for Linux

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 01:07:52 +0000

I don't remember what I was looking for, but I don't remember finding it, and what I do remember finding is what looks like another decent text-mode text editor (is that redundant?) for Linux and Unix.

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