How to use ncurses to manipulate your terminal screen.

Decimals to Roman numerals—here we hit all the limitations of Bash shell scripting.

A look at the benefits of using pathlib, the "object-oriented way of dealing with paths". Working with files is one of the most common things developers do. After all, you often want to read from files (to read information saved by other users, sessions or programs) or write to files (to record data for other users, sessions or programs).

Don't expose your system with sloppy scripts!

How to get started with this useful new programming language.

Learn a few techniques for avoiding the pipe and making your command-line commands more efficient. Anyone who uses the command line would acknowledge how powerful the pipe is. Because of the pipe, you can take the output from one command and feed it to another command as input. What's more, you can chain one command after another until you have exactly the output you want.

Use the Python Netmiko module to automate switches, routers and firewalls from multiple vendors.

Improve your Python testing even more.

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.

When in Rome: finishing the Roman numeral converter script. In my last article, I started digging in to a classic computer science puzzle: converting Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. First off, it more accurately should be called Hindu-Arabic, and it's worth mentioning that it's believed to have been invented somewhere between the first and fourth century—a counting system based on 0..9 values.

Testing functions isn't hard, but how do you test user input and output? In my last article, I started looking at "pytest", a framework for testing Python programs that's really changed the way I look at testing. For the first time, I really feel like testing is something I can and should do on a regular basis; pytest makes things so easy and straightforward.

Fun with retro-coding a Roman numeral converter—I head back to my college years and solve me homework anew! I earned a bachelor's degree in computer science back in the dawn of computing. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that long ago, but we did talk about Ada and FORTRAN in class. As a UCSD alumnus, however, it's no surprise that UCSD Pascal was the programming language of choice. Don't worry; no punch cards and no paper tape were involved in my educational endeavors.

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line heavily along with all the standard utilities and services that came with your distribution. At lot has changed since then, and nowadays, you can use a standard Linux desktop without ever having to open a terminal or use old UNIX services. Even as a sysadmin, these days, you often are a few layers of abstraction above some of these core services.

Using Python's os.walk function to walk through a tree of files and directories. I'm a web guy; I put together my first site in early 1993. And so, when I started to do Python training, I assumed that most of my students also were going to be web developers or aspiring web developers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although some of my students certainly are interested in web applications, the majority of them are software engineers, testers, data scientists and system administrators.

URLify: convert letter sequences into safe URLs with hex equivalents. This is my 155th column. That means I've been writing for Linux Journal for: $ echo "155/12" | bc 12 No, wait, that's not right. Let's try that again:

Who needs a custom NAS OS or a web-based GUI when command-line NAS software is so easy to configure?

I recently created a video demonstration of how to do some work at the command line, but as I tried to record my video, I kept running into problems. I'm just not the kind of person who can type commands at a keyboard and talk about it at the same time. I quickly realized I needed a way to simulate typing, so I could create a "canned" demonstration that I could narrate in my video.

Ubuntu changed networking. Embrace the YAML.

The Raspberry Pi has been very popular among hobbyists and educators ever since its launch in 2011. It’s a credit-card-sized single-board computer with a Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, USB ports, GPIO pins, Ethernet, HDMI out, camera header and an SD card slot. The most attractive aspects of the Raspberry Pi are its low cost of $35 and large user community following. Join us this weekend as we explore some cool Raspberry Pi projects.

Dave finishes up the PAIRS concentration game, only to realize it's too hard to solve! In my last article, I tossed away my PC card and talked about how I was a fan of the British colonial-era writer Rudyard Kipling. With that in mind, I do appreciate that you're still reading my column.