Purpose of this blog

There is so much knowledge around us and it is growing at such a rapid pace that human beings are no longer capable of keeping everything in their brain let alone remember the important things when required. My interests in a variety of fields ranging from technology, finance, law, world affairs to my childhood interest in Sanskrit and my hobbies has always stimulated my desire to study and get to know about various topics related to these fields. I strive to understand diverse aspects and different viewpoints and also try to develop my opinion based on the knowledge that I have gained and from experiences of people around me. Generally, your understanding of the topic improves by writing about and explaining it to a layman in simplest of words. I would be working to improve my knowledge of various topics and hope to give you simplistic content to read and enjoy.

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True or False with Bash

One of the first rules that is taught in any programming course is that 0 means False and anything that is non-zero is considered True. But when you come to system programming in Unix environment, you need to completely forget this basic programming rule. In unix shells, this rule is flipped and 0 means true / success while anything non-zero means false / failure. Every executed command in unix shells returns an exit status according to this convention. Let's see some examples in bash We will use the echo $? to get the exit status for the previously executed command. (The detailed explanation of this command is out of the scope of this article) The first example is as always to print "Hello World!" There are two ways of printing "Hello World!" as shown above. In both the cases, the exit status is 0 as the printing is successful. Let's check the true and false variables. As you can see, false returns 1. Another example using conditionals. ...

Simple HTTP Server in Python

Have you ever come across a need to share a file over a local network to a number of machines? Have you ever felt the need to share output of a task in text files available at a web-endpoint? Often, there is a requirement to quickly setup a light-weight web-server for such requirements. Python provides the easiest way to setup a simple HTTP server for such use cases with a single command. Python comes pre-installed with Linux as many of the linux libraries use python in background. Therefore there is no extra overhead of installing python. With support for python2 getting stopped in April 2020, many of the newer versions of linux distros come with default python3. Therefore this post will focus on setting up an HTTP server using both python2 and python3. We will be using Ubuntu 16.04, however it will work for majority of the linux systems where python comes pre-installed. Preparation Steps to follow before starting the server: Make sure you are in the directory which you want ...

Programmer's Guide: The "set" command in bash

The "set" command in shell allows you to set various shell options and positional parameters. The purpose of this post is to highlight how much this command has been helpful to me in my bash programming. I would not go into much depth about all the possible flag, because you can find many posts and documentation on the internet, like this post by GNU, which cover all the possible options that the "set" command provides. I will mainly focus on two options, The " set -x " option: This option allows us to print commands and their arguments, after they are expanded (interpolated) but before they are executed. Let us execute a simple hello world programme in bash. When the programme is executed, we see the entire printf statement being printed before the actual "Hello World!" message is printed. This way, we can check the command that is being executed along with its output. Setting the flag also expands any variables or ar...

Shodh for Truth

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