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Ditching Out-of-Date Documentation Infrastructure

Long ago, the Linux kernel started using 00-Index files to list the contents of each documentation directory. This was intended to explain what each of those files documented. Henrik Austad recently pointed out that those files have been out of date for a very long time and were probably not used by anyone anymore. This is nothing new. Henrik said in his post that this had been discussed already for years, "and they have since then grown further out of date, so perhaps it is time to just throw them out."

He counted hundreds of instances where the 00-index file was out of date or not present when it should have been. He posted a patch to rip them all unceremoniously out of the kernel.

Zack Brown - January 17, 2019
bash
Bash's Built-in printf Function
Mitch Frazier
January 16, 2019
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Where There's No Distance or Gravity
Doc Searls
January 15, 2019
Python
Python Testing with pytest: Fixtures and Coverage
Reuven M. Lerner
January 14, 2019

Breaking News

Oracle Releases First Critical Patch Update of 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Drop MongoDB, The Linux Foundation Announces Its 2019 Event Lineup, Firefox Closing Its Test Pilot Program and GoDaddy to Support AdoptOpenJDK
Jill Franklin
January 17, 2019
Keep Smart Assistants from Spying on You with Alias, Security Advisory for Old scp Clients, Major Metasploit Framework Release, Mozilla Working on a New Browser for Android and VirtualBox 6.0.2 Is Out
Jill Franklin
January 16, 2019
Participate in Fedora Test Day Today, Netrunner Announces Netrunner 19.01 Blackbird, Security Patch for GNOME Bluetooth Tools in Ubuntu 18.04, New Giant Board SBC from Groboard and Linspire Posts Development Roadmap for 2019-2020
Jill Franklin
January 15, 2019
Purism Announces Version 4 of Its Laptops, KDE Frameworks 5.54.0 Now Available, Debian 10 Default Theme Chosen, Linux Kernel 5.0-rc2 Is Out and Mozilla to Disable Flash in Firefox 69
Jill Franklin
January 14, 2019
Systemd Security Holes Discovered, GNOME 3.31.4 Released, Mozilla Launches Flexbox Inspector, Timesys Announces New Version of TimeStorm IDE and Clonezilla Live (2.6.0-37) Now Available
Jill Franklin
January 11, 2019
see more news >>
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Non-Child Process Exit Notification Support

Daniel Colascione submitted some code to support processes knowing when others have terminated. Normally a process can tell when its own child processes have ended, but not unrelated processes, or at least not trivially. Daniel's patch created a new file in the /proc directory entry for each process—a file called "exithand" that is readable by any other process.
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Back to Basics: Sort and Uniq

Learn the fundamentals of sorting and de-duplicating text on the command line. If you've been using the command line for a long time, it's easy to take the commands you use every day for granted. But, if you're new to the Linux command line, there are several commands that make your life easier that you may not stumble upon automatically. In this article, I cover the basics of two commands that are essential in anyone's arsenal: sort and uniq.
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Using Linux for Logic

I've covered tons of different scientific applications you can run on your computer to do rather complex calculations, but so far, I've not really given much thought to the hardware on which this software runs. So in this article, I take a look at a software package that lets you dive deep down to the level of the logic gates used to build up computational units.
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Unit Testing in the Linux Kernel

Brendan Higgins recently proposed adding unit tests to the Linux kernel, supplementing other development infrastructure such as perf, autotest and kselftest. The whole issue of testing is very dear to kernel developers' hearts, because Linux sits at the core of the system and often has a very strong stability/security requirement. Hosts of automated tests regularly churn through kernel source code, reporting any oddities to the mailing list.
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