Hacker News: pixelbeat

New comment by pixelbeat in "Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD"

pixelbeat — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:17:20 +0000

We take such reports seriously. I couldn't find any when searching again

New comment by pixelbeat in "Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD"

pixelbeat — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:39:04 +0000

Where did you report those coreutils issues?

New comment by pixelbeat in "Improving the integration between terminal and web"

pixelbeat — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:38:46 +0000

How the latest coreutils leveraged terminal hyperlinks to directly link to the full online documentation

Improving the integration between terminal and web

pixelbeat — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:38:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/tty_links/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006804

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by pixelbeat in "GNU Coreutils 9.8 Released with New Features"

pixelbeat — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:51:52 +0000

Phoronix didn't link the full NEWS: https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10816

Some extra notes...

Accurate (cgroup aware) nproc is important, as detailed in: https://danluu.com/cgroup-throttling/

The new base58 encoding performs well being around 500 times faster than arbitrary int implementation internal to cpython 3.13 for example

New comment by pixelbeat in "Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance"

pixelbeat — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:49:16 +0000

GNU coreutils can be built as a single binary with ./configure --enable-single-binary. One can install this variant on Fedora for example with the coreutils-single package, and this is used in some container images.

New comment by pixelbeat in "Reservoir Sampling"

pixelbeat — Thu, 08 May 2025 19:01:23 +0000

FWIW GNU coreutils' shuf uses reservoir sampling for larger inputs to give bounded memory operation

New comment by pixelbeat in "One quantum transition makes light at 21 cm"

pixelbeat — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:59:57 +0000

42/2

New comment by pixelbeat in "Bash-ini-parser: Advanced bash INI parser library"

pixelbeat — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:39:06 +0000

For similar functionality have a look at crudini, which is a utility designed for interacting with ini files from shell scripts:

https://github.com/pixelb/crudini

New comment by pixelbeat in "Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering"

pixelbeat — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 18:57:26 +0000

Nice article. See also: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/

It's also worth mentioning a recent improvement we made (in coreutils 8.28) to the operation of the `tail | grep` example in the article. tail now notices if the pipe goes away, so one could wait for something to appear in a log, like:

    tail -f /log/file | grep -q match
    then_do_something

There are lots of gotchas to pipe handling really. See also: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html

New comment by pixelbeat in "A mental model for Linux file, hard and soft links"

pixelbeat — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:09:42 +0000

You might find my "symlinks, hardlinks and reflinks explained" article useful: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unix_links.html

New comment by pixelbeat in "Entering text in the terminal is complicated"

pixelbeat — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 08:19:50 +0000

The vi vs emacs thing permeates a lot of tools. I find it useful to map all tools to be consistent with one or the other. Personally I use vi. Unfortunately setting vi mode for readline has a few caveats, but I was able to work around all of them with the settings in:

https://www.pixelbeat.org/settings/.inputrc

New comment by pixelbeat in "Why is /usr/bin/test 4kiB smaller than /usr/bin/[?"

pixelbeat — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 21:35:01 +0000

One might be wondering why 'test' and '[' are separate binaries at all. This is to give maximum flexibility wrt copying binaries etc. Note one can build coreutils like busybox as a single binary, by just `./configure --enable-single-binary` at build time. This is already available as an option on Fedora at least through the coreutils-single (1.2MB) package.

New comment by pixelbeat in "Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux"

pixelbeat — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:52:42 +0000

Sounds like a case of: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html

uutils uses the coreutils test suite, so it makes sense to add a test case for that, which uutils will eventually get to. I'll do that now.

New comment by pixelbeat in "Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise"

pixelbeat — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 16:17:24 +0000

yes(1) is the standard unix way of generating repeated data. It's good to do this as quickly as possible. I really don't understand why so many get annoyed with this code. 130 lines isn't that complicated in the scheme of things.

New comment by pixelbeat in "Ftfy – fix Unicode that's broken in various ways"

pixelbeat — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 17:21:10 +0000

Nice. This handles the mangled example I discussed at:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unicode_utils/

New comment by pixelbeat in "How to Print Integers Really Fast"

pixelbeat — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 13:58:43 +0000

GNU seq uses this trick:

slow path:

    seq -f '%.1f' inf | pv > /dev/null
     ...[  12MiB/s]

fast path:

    seq inf | pv > /dev/null
     ...[ 491MiB/s]

New comment by pixelbeat in "A Little Story About the `yes` Unix Command"

pixelbeat — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 02:51:21 +0000

The GNU variant was discussed recently at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542938

The commit that sped up GNU yes has a summary of the perf measurements: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/3521722

yes can be used to generate arbitrary repeated data for testing or whatever, so it is useful to be fast

New comment by pixelbeat in "Parallel processing with Unix tools"

pixelbeat — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 22:04:31 +0000

Very good point. I added a whole section to the article, implementing the counting lines example with `make -j`, which performs just as well as `xargs -P`

Parallel processing with unix tools

pixelbeat — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 03:53:33 +0000

Article URL: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unix-parallel-tools.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15056908

Points: 1

# Comments: 0