Pervasive Code

If you make a screen with a name using screen -S foo and then try and reattach later using screen -R f<tab> it doesn’t work. It only completes the full name as seen in screen -ls which starts with the PID of the detached screen, like 9972.foo. Not very convenient. Why can’t it just complete using the name you gave it?

Someone else solved this problem three years ago but nobody accepted their patch, and now /etc/bash_completion.d/screen has been overhauled and the patch no longer applies.

I updated the patch so it works and resubmitted it to Ubuntu.

If you don’t wanna wait, grab the code from this gist and do this:

sudo patch /etc/bash_completion.d/screen screen.patch

This will probably work on Debian too since that’s where the completion script came from.

SSH port forwarding is so useful that sometimes you want to daemonize it, to create encrypted tunnels that never go away. But it’s not trivial to do this. Fortunately it is possible with a little fiddling, and I did it using monit.
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Pretty much every Unix user knows about the kill command, and most know about ‘kill -KILL’ aka ‘kill -9′.

But do you know about kill -STOP and kill -CONT?
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Argh! I spent about 5 hours yesterday troubleshooting a failed Ubuntu Jaunty -> Karmic (9.04->9.10) upgrade. It worked fine until I rebooted and then failed to boot. Here’s how I fixed it.
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Once again Ubuntu Linux proves itself to be easy to upgrade. Going from 9.04 to 9.10 (one release newer, since their numbering is bsaed on dates) was easy, but included the standard sprinkling of manual re-customization that I’ve come to expect from Debian based systems.
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