Hacker News: i15e

New comment by i15e in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

i15e — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:33:58 +0000

I'm not seeing any ? marks in my code. Are you referring to the instances of $'\t'? In bash (and other shells, including recent versions of the POSIX sh specification) $'...' is treated like a C-style string complete with backslash escape sequences, so $'\t' is a way to have a tab character as a part of a command argument.

New comment by i15e in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

i15e — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:06:19 +0000

A variant:

  docker image ls -a | stdbuf -oL sed -r 's/\s{2,}/\t/g' | { head -n1; tail -n+2 | sort -hrk5 -t$'\t'; } | column -ts$'\t'

I used docker since that's what I have installed and I assume the output is equivalent.

sort's -t is set to tab for field separation.

stdbuf sets sed's output to only buffer a line at a time and flush, so the head in the {...} command group doesn't completely consume stdin's contents before it's passed to tail.

The column command recreates the space-aligned table based on tab-delimited input.

New comment by i15e in "Ask HN: Extendable" Shell Commands?"

i15e — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:10:52 +0000

You can use Ctrl+z to suspend the foreground process, bg to resume it in the background, and then wait to wait for it to complete. By default wait will wait for all jobs to finish and then return a success exit code, however if you give it a specific job ID it will instead return the exit code of the waited-on process:

    $ (sleep 10; false)
    ^Z
    [1]+  Stopped                 ( sleep 10; false )
    $ wait %% && echo ok || echo nok
    [1]+  Exit 1                  ( sleep 10; false )
    nok

New comment by i15e in "WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics"

i15e — Thu, 23 May 2024 13:58:03 +0000

You could install the Google Drive client and then run WinDirStat against the virtual drive letter that it creates:

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124

New comment by i15e in "What We're Working on in Firefox"

i15e — Wed, 22 May 2024 14:23:26 +0000

In Firefox you can go to about:profiles to easily open new windows using other profiles. I bookmark that page with a keyword for quick access. (Also see about:about for a list of other handy 'about' pages)

A more classic-style profile switcher is available via the '-P' (or '-ProfileManager') command-line switch. If FF is in your $PATH you can run:

  firefox -P

The '-P' switch can also take an argument of a profile name to open it directly.

But yes, it would be nice if at least one of these options were exposed in the UI so it was more discoverable by users.

New comment by i15e in "Beej's Quick Guide to GDB (2009)"

i15e — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 03:09:05 +0000

gf2 is worth looking at: https://github.com/nakst/gf

New comment by i15e in "Exploratory data analysis for humanities data"

i15e — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 20:11:01 +0000

Something to watch out for with nl is that by default it doesn't number empty lines. e.g.:

  $ printf 'one\n\nthree\n' | nl
     1  one

     2  three

Set -ba to enable numbering all lines.

For this use case I usually end up running cat -n instead since I find it easier to remember.

New comment by i15e in "A terminal case of Linux"

i15e — Tue, 30 May 2023 17:07:50 +0000

Your original command should work fine.

find does not pass arguments through an intermediate shell, so there are no quoting concerns with regard to spaces in filenames, etc.

And with the form of -exec terminated by a ; it runs a single command for each matching filesystem entry, so there will be no issues with exceeding the maximum argument size.

You can verify via strace:

  $ touch 'a b.md' 'c d.md'
  $ strace -fe execve find . -iname '*.md' -exec unbuffer ls {} \;

At the end of the exec chains you should see the following:

  execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "./c d.md"] ...
  execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "./a b.md"] ...

The filenames are being passed through spaces and all.

However if this were a real scenario, a better solution might be:

  find . -iname '*.md' -exec unbuffer ls -1 {} +

(Look up the -1 flag for ls, and the + variant of -exec for find for details)

New comment by i15e in "Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer"

i15e — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:21:05 +0000

I did something similar using the 'at' daemon's 'now' time specification to "fork" off background tasks from a web request using the same .php file. It actually worked well for what I needed at the time!

New comment by i15e in "Tell HN: Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and now web cams"

i15e — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 18:17:31 +0000

Another plus of DroidCam is that it supports streaming the video over USB so no WiFi is necessary.