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Unix Find Tutorial

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Version 5.00 (Nov 1, 2018)

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Find overview
  3. In depth coverage (separate pages used)

  4. Summary

  5. Webliography


Introduction

See also
Softpanorama find page
Recommended Links
Man pages
Examples
xargs
tar
cpio
Sysadmin Horror Stories
The Unix Hater’s Handbook

The idea behind find is extremely simple: this is a utility for searching files using the directory information. Despite simplicity of the idea, Unix find is a complex utility with its own mini language. Its behaviour is not intuitive and in complex cases it often fools even experienced UNIX professionals.

Find is useful not only as search instrument, but also can enhance functionality of those Unix utilities that do not include tree traversal. For example few know that GNU grep has -r option for that can be used to perform simple tree traversal tasks, for example grep -r "search string" /tmp.). But you can always use find with grep to achieve the same purpose with more flexibility.

There are several versions of find with the main two being POSIX find used in Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX and GNU find used in linux. GNU find was written by Written by Eric B. Decker, James Youngman, and Kevin Dalley. Version 4.5 or later is recommended. For full path Perl-style regular expressions are supported (via option -regex). for file name you can use only either AWK regex or egrep regex. GNU find can also be used with Windows as it is a part of Cygwin package.

Utility find  should theoretically understands several types of regular expression with the most important being basic (default) and extended regex (the same as used in egrep).  The desired type of regex can be specified with the option -regextype . Currently it implements five types of regex. But do not worry: as of November 2018, in versions of Linux that I tested (6.5-6.10 and 7.3-7.5)  this option does not  work, so you are confined to basic regex ;-):

  1. posix-basic -- This is the default (and  the only one that currently works).   Metacharacter ? is one arbitrary letter, and dot is the symbol dot not a metacharacter (NOTE: find man page tells us that the default is Emacs Regex, but this is not true in most versions of Linux)
  2. posix-extended -- the only other implemented type of regex that makes sense
  3. posix-awk -- makes sense only for sysadmins with very good knowledge of AWK. Basically identical to  posix-extended
  4. posix-egrep  -- basically identical to  posix-extended
  5. emacs  See EmacsWiki Regexp References. Man page incorrectly states that this is the default. This is not true as Emacs regex are a flavor of extended regex, not basic regex.

GNU find can (and probably should) be installed on Solaris, HP-UX and AIX and used instead of POSIX find, as it is more powerful, more flexible implementation that native find implementations. Pre-compiled by vendor version of GNU find are available on each of those three platforms. For sysadmin it is better to have a good knowledge of one utility then a mediocre knowledge of two similar, but with many subtle differences in implementations of find (as always, devil is in details).

The popularity of find is related to the fact that it can do more then a simple tree traversal available with option -r (and/or -R) in many Unix utilities. Unix also maintains a database of files used in locate utility, but the capabilities of locate are tiny in comparison with capabilities of find queries. Find is especially useful for finding "lost" or "misplaced" files" in the filesystem as well as for mass operation with files meeting certain criteria (name, age, size, permission, etc)  like deletion, changing of attributes, backup, and transmission to other servers, or other filesystems, or parts of the local filesystem.

The utility find traverses the specified filesystem and all mounted on it filesystems (unless option -xdev is specified, which blocks this behaviors). symlinks by default are not followed (can  be changed with option -L). For each file the specified query ais applied   and if the results is trur some actions can be performed. Evaluation of predicates in find  logical expression (also called search expression or query) is done in shortcut "AND" fashion:  as soon as a predicate fails no other are evaluated. So proper order of predicated in the queries can increase the efficiency of processing.

The traversal of directory tree provided by find is very flexible. You can excluded deeply nest tree branches using -maxdepth predicate, block entering mounted filesystems. Traversal also can be limited to specific types of filesystem. Those capabilities are far superior to primitive built-in tree traversal (recursive option)  that most Unix utilities provide. In this sense, find is a nice example of Unix component philosophy. It not only performs the main function it was designed for, but can serve as an enhancer of functionally of other utilities including utilities that do not have built-in capability to traverse the directory tree.

Find application specific language

From the point of view of computer science find is an interpreter of its own language for specifying queries, which is pretty flexible and powerful, but is highly idiosyncratic -- it is used only in find.  The language statement consists of multiple predicates by default connected via implicit logical AND.  This implicit order of evaluation can be modified using round brackets and by using OR instead of AND for linking two ro more predicates like in  classic Boolean logical expressions. Negation is also supported.  For historical reasons find mini-language is completely different from all other UNIX commands: it uses full-word options rather than single-letter options. For example, instead of a typical Unix-style option -f to specify filenames (like in tar -xvf mytar.tar) find uses option -name

Each predicate iether checks for specific condition (in this case it returns true of false for each file checked), or perform specific action on file that already "passed" previous conditions (in this case it is always returns true).  While essentially any find query is a logical expression, we can also can view it as a pipeline, when each check serves as a filter and cuts file that do no satisfy specified by it criteria. 

This is a unique case of Unix utility in which  you specify not a set of options, but a query in an application-specific language on the command line. Unlike the typical situation with options, the order of components of this query (called predicates) is important.

Using "find application specific language you can create complex logical expressions describing the qualities of the files. By default they are connected with AND, but if needed you can also specify set of expressions connected by OR logical operation.

Some predicates are, in essence, more like regular Unix utilities options which change the overall behavior of find (for example, option mount prohibits following mound points in filesystem traversal); it does not  ake any sense to specify it in any other place other the first, as it applied to the whole query. 

By default find executes the action -print at the end sending the result to STDIN. So even in action -print is not specified at the end of the the query, in the absence of other actions it is added automatically at the end. There are several "replacement actions" like -ls or -exec  . 

While file can's accept stdin as input stream -- it generated input steam internally by traversing the filesystem, it can pass it s output to the pipe. In this sense it can be called "semi-filter". And in this role it is widely used as the first stage in pipes.

With the advent of scripting languages this idiosyncratic mini-language for specifying queries probably outlived its usefulness, but nobody has courage to enhance find adding a standard scripting language as a macro language: find is way too entrenched in Unix to be easily replaced with something better.

Moreover, Unix still does not has a standard macrolanguage similar to Visual Basic in Windows, so, for example, adding Lua as a macrolanguage might be a bad idea, if it popularity might wane in the next decade, and other similar language became dominant. such a language  can be enforced on the community iether  via POSIX, or ir should be supported by some important player (now there are two such players -- IBM and Google ;-).  At one time Sun played with the idea of using TCL as such a universal macrolanguage in Solaris, but it became distracted by Java and the idea died.  Another attempt in the same direction was GNU Guile created by FSF as alternative to TCL, which was hated by Stallman. Guile also flopped. Which was a very sad development.  TCL or Guile or LUA adoption as a standard macrolanguage would improved Unix  ecosystem dramatically. Linux does not even reached the level which mainframes reaches with REXX many many years ago, so in a sense it is a backward OS. But we digress...

Search root

The first argument for find is the directory to search (search root in find terminology). It important to understand that search root can consist of multiple directories, for example:

find /usr /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /opt -name sar # No /proc /tmp /var

In the example above we exclude non-relevant directories from the list of second level Unix directories that contain binaries. You can do something like that  programmatically

find `ls -d /[ubso]*` -name sar # No /proc /tmp /var

Search root can consist of multiple directories

Searching for a binary that is not in the path is a frequent operation for most sysadmins, so creating an alias or function for this purpose makes perfect sense. For example, a simple function that allow n search executables can look like:

function ffind {
    find /usr /bin /sbin /opt -name "$1*" -type f -ls
}

The list of directories to search can also be generated by script, for example

find `gen_root_dirs.sh` -type f -size 0 -ls # find files with zero size

Here we assume gen_root_dirs.sh returns the list of directories in which we need to perform the search.

Search expression

After the list of directories to search (search root) find expects so called "search expression". In other words, the first argument starting with "-" is considered to be a start of "search expression".

Search expression can be quite complex and contain several parts connected with -and (default) or  -or predicate.  With occasional use of -not ('!') Each component of search expression is evaluated to true or false and if resulting lofical expression is true then "action" options are executed. The defaul "action" option is to pront the name of the file with the path to STDOUT  there are other action components like -exec which have side effects.

By default individual elements are assumed to be connected with AND predicate so all of them need to be true to list the file in the results. For example to look across the /usr/local and /var/www/html directory trees for filenames that contain the pattern "*.?htm*", you can use the following command:

find /srv/www /var/html -name "*.?htm*" -type f

Please note that the order of components does matter, and that you need quotes for any regex. Otherwise *htm* it will be evaluated immediately in the context of the current directory by shell. Find can use several types of regular expressions. Default is basic regex or DOS-style regex, if you wish; actually find uses as default emacs regex which is very close but not identical (for example allowing alteration with '|'), but we will not delve in subtle differences between the two.  See EmacsWiki Regular Expression for details.

It is difficult to remember all the details of this language unless you construct complex queries each day and that's why this page was created. Sometimes errors and miscalculations in constructing find search expression lead to real disasters. That typically happens when find is used to execute commands like rm, chown, chmod (via -exec option, see below). You can wipe substantial part of directory tree or change attributes of system files, if you are not careful. The key for preventing such disasters is to test complex find search expression and see the list of file affected before running it with rm, chown, chmod specified in -exec option.

So the first rule of using find is never execute complex query against the filesystem with -exec option. First use -ls option to see what files will be picked up and only then convert it into -exec. Of course in a hurry and under pressure all rules go down the toilet, but still it make sense to remember this simple rule. Please read Typical Errors in using find. It might help you to avoid some of the most nasty errors.

Never try to execute complex find query with -exec option without first testing the result by replacing -exec option with -ls option. Please read Typical Errors in using find. It might help you to avoid some of the most nasty errors.

Along with this page it make sense to consult the list of typical (and not so typical) examples which can be found in in Examples page on this site as well as in the links listed in Webliography.

An excellent paper Advanced techniques for using the UNIX find command was written by Bill Zimmerly. I highly recommend to read it and print for the reference. Several examples in this tutorial are borrowed from the article.

An excellent paper Advanced techniques for using the UNIX find command was written by Bill Zimmerly. I highly recommend to read it and then print for a reference. Several examples in this tutorial are borrowed from the article.

Predicates and options of the search expression

The full search expression language contains several dozens of different predicates and options. There are two versions of this language:

GNU find is preferable and can make a difference in complex scripts. But for interactive use the differences is minor: only small subset of options is typically used on day-to-day basis by system administrators. Among them:

Other useful options of the find command include:

  1. -regex regex [GNU find only] File full pathname matches regular expression. This is a match on the whole pathname not just a filename. Predicate "-iregex" option provides the capability to ignore case.

  2. -perm permissions Locates files with certain permission settings. Often used for finding world-writable files or SUID files. See separate page devoted to the topic
  3. -user Locates files that have specified ownership. Option -nouser locates files without ownership. For such files no user in /etc/passwd corresponds to file's numeric user ID (UID). such files are often created when tar of sip archive is transferred from other server on which the account probably exists under a different UID)
  4. -group Locates files that are owned by specified group. Option -nogroup means that no group corresponds to file's numeric group ID (GID) of the file. This is useful option for server cleanup, as with time structure of the groups changes but some file remain in now defunct groups. Also files and tar balls downloaded by root from other servers might have numeric groups that have no match on the box.
  5. -size Locates files with specified size. -size attribute lets you specify how big the files should be to match. You can specify your size in kilobytes and optionally also use + or - to specify size greater than or less than specified argument. For example:
    find /home -name "*.txt" -size 100k
    find /home -name "*.txt" -size +100k
    find /home -name "*.txt" -size -100k

    The first brings up files of exactly 100KB, the second only files greater than 100KB, and the last only files less than 100KB.

  6. -ls list current file in ls -dils format on standard output.
  7. -type Locates a certain type of file. The most typical options for -type are as following:

    For example, to limit search to directories use can use the -type d specifier. Here's one example:

    find . -type d -print

As a syntax helper one can use a web form for generating search expression. Unix find command helper. In no way that means that you can skip testing, especially if you plan to use option -exec. Such web forms are purely syntax helpers. It is testing (and only testing) that can reveal some nasty surprises in what you thought is a perfectly correct search expression.

Find overview

name and type predicates

The most commonly used predicate in find is  -name, which compares the name of the file (without path) with a string or regex and returns true or false as a result of this comparison. If you want to evaluate regular expression against the whole path you need to use the predicate -regex  instead.

Theoretically the type of regex in find is user-definable and can be changed with the option -regextype. which allows file  types of regex:

The problem is that in version of find that I tested this option does nothing, and the only type of regex find accepts is basic regex. For example

find -regextype posix-extended /etc -name '^[a-z].*\.[0-9]+$'> # -- DOES NOT WORK. Should find all files in /etc that start with the letter and have numeric suffix

If regular expression is specified, is should be enclosed in quotation marks to prevent the shell from expanding it before the find command:

find /etc -name "*.conf"

The example above find will list names of all objects in the /etc directories  (file, directories, symlinks, etc) that ends with .conf. We probably do not need to list directories and symlinks, so we better add option -type  to limit search to just regular files. The -type f  is the most common option used is find searches. The type can also be b (block device), c (character device), d (directory), p (pipe), l (symbolic link), or s (socket).

find / -name "*.conf"  -type f

In this example the two predicates  -name "*.conf" and -type f  form a simple find expression.  As we already mentioned above,  individual predicates in the expression are connected with logical AND. They are evaluated from left to right.  some predicates like -maxdepth affect the amount of traverse files and should always  be specified first.

So for a file  to get to the end of the expression (were implicit -print predicate will be executed on file) a file should meet both of these conditions: it should have suffix "conf" and be a regular file.

To reverse the condition you can use to prefix it with -not.

find / -name "*.conf"  -not -type f

To specify  -or condition you need to use round brackets (as shell interprets round brackets as metasymbols too, they need to be escaped or put in  quotes)

find /etc \( type f -or type l \)

Connecting individual predicates into the logical expression

Summarizing the predicate can be organized into:

For example, to count the number of regular files and directories, do this:

[root@test01 etc]# find /etc -name "*.conf" '(' -type f  -or -type d ')' | wc -l

The number of files without suffix .conf  can be counted as well.

find . ! -name "*.conf" -type f | wc -l

Parentheses must be escaped by a backslash or quotes to prevent Bash from interpreting them as a subshell. Using parentheses, the number of files ending in .txt or .sh can be expressed as

$ find . '(' -name "*.conf" -or -name '*.config' ')' -type f | wc -l

Find as poor man "detective", timestamps related predicates

With so many files in the typical linux filesystem finding  missing files is a regular pasture of sysadmins. Usually you  remember several facts about missing file. among them:

There are several predicates in find which can be to test files of iether the access (atime) or modification time(mtime), which is the time a file was last read or written stored in the inode.  There is also the third time stand called creation time ("ctime") which actually is not attribute of the file but a directory in which file is listed and is nothing more then a date when the particular record in the directory was created. 

Fins provides reasonably flexible capabilities of specifying need time interval iether  in days or minutes. Historically, find times were measured in days (ctime, mtime) in connection with the other file ( -newer), but the GNU version extended this capability provided options that allow specify the tike interval in hours (like -min switch).

 find can look for files that were created or modified exactly in the specified interval, older then certain threshold, or newer then certain threshold.

the most common are check for modified time. You can check the modified time, which is the time a file was last written to, by using -newer, -mtime, and -mmin. The -newer switch checks to see whether one file was modified more recently than a specified file. -mtime tests the number of days ago a file was accessed. -mmin allows to specified minutes inread of days.

In other words, i a plus sign (+) precedes the amount of time, find searches for times greater than this amount. If a minus sign (-) precedes the time measurement, find searches for times less than this amount.  Likewise, -min -5 in minutes means “younger than 5 minutes” or “zero to four minutes old”.

In addition to modification time can use the similar conditions with  the creation time. The relevant options are -cnewer, -ctime, and -cmin. The inode timestamp usually, but not always, represents the time the file was created.

Here are options we discussed for reference:

-amin n
File was last accessed n minutes ago.
-anewer file
File was last accessed more recently than file was modified. If file is a symbolic link and the -H  option or the -L  option is in effect, the access time of the file it points to is always used.
-atime n
File was last accessed n*24 hours ago. When find figures out how many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to have been accessed at least two days ago.
-cmin n
File's status was last changed n minutes ago.
-cnewer file
File's status was last changed more recently than file was modified. If file is a symbolic link and the -H  option or the -L  option is in effect, the status-change time of the file it points to is always used.
-ctime n
File's status was last changed n*24 hours ago. See the comments for -atime  to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file status change times.
-empty

File is empty and is either a regular file or a directory.

Searching files of certain  size

The -size predicate tests the size of a file. The default measurement is 512-byte blocks, which is counterintuitive to many users and a common source of errors. Unlike the time-measurement predicates, which have different predicates for different measurements of time, to change the unit of measurement for size you must follow the amount with a b (bytes), c (characters), k (kilobytes), M (megabyte) G (gigabytes).  Like the time measurements, the amount can have a minus sign (-) to test for files smaller than the specified size, or a plus sign (+) to test for larger files.

For example, use this to find log files greater than 1GB:

$ find / -type f  -size +1G

find shows the matching paths on standard output. Historically, the -print  (whihc is the default and can be omitted) or -ls predicates are used to specify format of output. There is also printf option (or action, to be more precise) which allow to print  selected attributes. Printing the paths is the default behavior. As sometime Unix servers often store files from Microsoft Windows where using blanks in filenames are common there is also special option -print0 which allow pipes such filenames to other utilities without automatic splitting them into parts. 

Traversal control

-follow
Deprecated; use the -L  option instead. Dereference symbolic links. Implies -noleaf. The -follow  option affects only those tests which appear after it on the command line. Unless the -H  or -L  option has been specified, the position of the -follow  option changes the behaviour of the -newer  predicate; any files listed as the argument of -newer  will be dereferenced if they are symbolic links. The same consideration applies to -newerXY, -anewer  and -cnewer. Similarly, the -type  predicate will always match against the type of the file that a symbolic link points to rather than the link itself. Using -follow  causes the -lname and -ilname  predicates always to return false.
-ignore_readdir_race
Normally, find  will emit an error message when it fails to stat a file. If you give this option and a file is deleted between the time find  reads the name of the file from the directory and the time it tries to stat the file, no error message will be issued. This also applies to files or directories whose names are given on the command line. This option takes effect at the time the command line is read, which means that you cannot search one part of the filesystem with this option on and part of it with this option off (if you need to do that, you will need to issue two find  commands instead, one with the option and one without it).
-maxdepth levels
Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of directories below the command line arguments. -maxdepth 0  means only apply the tests and actions to the command line arguments.
-mindepth levels
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a non-negative integer). -mindepth 1  means process all files except the command line arguments.
-mount Don't descend directories on other filesystems. An alternate name for -xdev, for compatibility with some other versions of find.

 

 

Performing additional actions  of matches files

To perform an action on a successful match, use -exec. The -exec switch runs a program on each matching file and have several modifications:

-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find  are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting of ';' is encountered. The string '{}' is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these constructions might need to be escaped (with a '\') or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec  option. The specified command is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory. There are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec  action; you should use the -execdir  option instead.
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec  action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs  builds its command lines. Only one instance of '{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.
-execdir command ;
-execdir command {} +
Like -exec, but the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file, which is not normally the directory in which you started find. This a much more secure method for invoking commands, as it avoids race conditions during resolution of the paths to the matched files. As with the -exec  action, the '+' form of -execdir  will build a command line to process more than one matched file, but any given invocation of command will only list files that exist in the same subdirectory. If you use this option, you must ensure that your $PATH  environment variable does not reference '.'; otherwise, an attacker can run any commands they like by leaving an appropriately-named file in a directory in which you will run -execdir. The same applies to having entries in $PATH  which are empty or which are not absolute directory names.
-ok command ;
Like -exec  but ask the user first. If the user agrees, run the command. Otherwise just return false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null.
The response to the prompt is matched against a pair of regular expressions to determine if it is an affirmative or negative response. This regular expression is obtained from the system if the 'POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable is set, or otherwise from find's message translations. If the system has no suitable definition, find's own definition will be used. In either case, the interpretation of the regular expression itself will be affected by the environment variables 'LC_CTYPE' (character classes) and 'LC_COLLATE' (character ranges and equivalence classes).
-okdir command ;
Like -execdir  but ask the user first in the same way as for -ok. If the user does not agree, just return false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null.

 As we already studied grep, we will use examples with grep, but it can be any utility or script.

Here is one simple example to find files with certain IP in /etc/hosts  (note usage of option -H in grep):

$ find /etc -type f -name hosts -exec grep -H -10.10.10.10 {} \;

More than one action can be specified. To show the filename after a grep match, include -print.

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep Table {} \; -print

find expects {} to appear by itself (that is, surrounded by whitespace). It can't be combined with other characters, such as in an attempt to form a new pathname. If this is necessary use wrapper script.

The -ok switch works the same way as -exec except that it asks for your condirmation whether the command should run. you cna view it as a debug option.

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" -ok rm {} \;
< rm ... ./orders.txt > ? n
< rm ... ./advocacy/linux.txt > ? n
< rm ... ./advocacy/old_orders.txt > ? n
				

The -ls action switch lists the matching files with more detail.

The -printf switch use set of macros which indicate what kind of information about the file to print:

Using find with xargs

The name xargs, pronounced EX-args, means “combine arguments.” xargs builds and executes command lines by gathering together arguments it reads on the standard input. Most often, these arguments are lists of file names generated by find.

This an alterative to using option -exec. The later can dangerous if used directly (for example you can detect level two directories in the deletion list and act accordingly), or it can be slow for a large number of files because the shell is invoked each match, whle most utilities can accept a list of aginments. When you have the option of piping the results to a second command, the execution speed is significantly faster than when using -exec. A pipe generates the results with two commands instead of hundreds or thousands of commands.

Xargs also allows debugging. 

Also some utilities does not accept the list of filenames from the standard input. for example grep is a filter and it treats standard input as the stream to be analyzed, not as the list of files to be processed.  Actually option --switch-stdio-to-filelist for grep would be very useful.

Xargs allot to convert the list of files proficed by find in multiple argumnet for grep or other ustilities invocation.  As suhc is is much better, more modern solution to this problem.

The core functionality of xargs is convert STDIN into iterative calls to whatever program is specified. By default xargs is suppling to each call as much filenames as OS system buffer allows, but you can epscify the exact number.

Let’s say that the output of find is a list of four files, one, two, three, and four. Using xargs, these files could be given to searched by grep  for particular lines much like with -exec option, but in single grep invocation with four arguments,  making processing more efficient and

find | xargs grep pattern
find /var/log -name "*.gz" -type f -size +0 -print | xargs gzip -xv 

Reminder:  -type f matches just plain files, and -size +0 matches files that aren’t zero bytes in size.

Tip

If you have spaces in filenames you need to use -print0 in find and then add an option -0 (zero) to xargs:

find $HOME -name "html" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i 
For more information see xargs Command Tutorial

Continued

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Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: July 28, 2019;

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