SSH is one communication protocol that is used to access remote systems all the time. Short for “Secure Shell”, SSH provides a secure channel for data exchange, unlike Telnet and other insecure remote shells. Telnet, e.g., transmits all data including passwords in plain text.
For a system A to connect to a remote system B through SSH, A needs a SSH client (like PuTTY for Windows) and B needs a SSHD server running all the time so as to accept incoming connections.
SSH is a proprietary software offered by SSH Communications Security, and as an alternative the open source version OpenSSH is …read more

Every Sunday, I perform a set of jobs on all my computers. They help optimize the system, save hard disk space, increase security and privacy, etc.
 
Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.)
Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives.
Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set.
Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”.
Defragment: Using …read more

DOS has a few commands like find, findstr and sort which can be used to manipulate text. ($ help <cmd> shows the usage help for all these commands.) However, their usage is very different from those that a Unix user may be familiar with.
One of the best things about Cygwin is that these commands useful for “quick and dirty” work on large chunks of text data are easy to learn, are consistent across all Unix-based OSs, have a number of options, and are quite extensive. When used in combination, they can save a lot of programming.
($ <command> <option> <inputs> is …read more

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.
find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.
The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If …read more

Every once in a while, there is some file that you know you’ve saved but yet can’t find it. Windows Search comes handy at such times but is very slow. Windows Desktop Search, a new utility that is now being shipped with the Windows OSs and being given as an update works using indexing. I think it was started to beat the competition of Google Desktop Search.
IMHO, both Windows and Google Desktop Search consume too many resources.
e.g. Windows Desktop Search recommends Pentium 1 GHz Processor and 256 MB RAM, 500 MB of free hard disk space,… A process that starts …read more

I am two days late, but never mind. Lifehacker, the fabulous site with everyday tips and downloads for getting things done, had its first post on 31st Jan 2005. What a phenomenal success it has achieved in these four years!
On this occasion, the super blog has two interesting posts: Our Best Posts From 2005 to 2009, and Weirdest and Most Controversial Posts.
I am especially thankful to Gina Trapani, the blog’s founding editor, for introducing me to Cygwin and the todo.sh. She used to make frequent posts but has been writing only a weekly column on the blog these days. …read more

It has been nearly two months since I introduced Cygwin. We’ve seen how to install Cygwin, customize the terminal, a few text editors and a tabbed terminal emulator. Enough with the playfulness. One final configuration and let us move on to the geekier fun.
Directory Structure
Cygwin uses the POSIX notation standard in paths. That is, instead of ‘\’ as in Windows, it uses the more convenient ‘/’ as in Unix. The web follows the same notation. For instance, take http://thatdamnpc.com/category/cygwin-unix. On the web host, one might find a directory called “category” in the main directory and a sub-directory “cygwin-unix” along with …read more

The terminal is an important aspect of Cygwin like for any Unix-based OS. For this reason, you might see its users like me chasing after fancy ways of beautifying it. Well, I will try to make this the last time.
Poderosa is the best terminal emulator for Cygwin that I have come across. It has a tabbed GUI, much like the PuTTY Connection Manager. However, in addition to the network communication protocols through which one can connect to a remote system using PuTTY, local Cygwin shells can also be opened using Poderosa. I use it mainly for the latter purpose.

Poderosa allows …read more