On 05Aug2011 10:20, Arturo Ovalle <[email protected]> wrote: | Thanks Cameron for your help. Both scripts are great, I'll try them | today. One question, should I run them from the terminal, or from IDLE?
I use a terminal myself. I often work with two terminals; one an editor showing the code and the other with a shell in it for running things. Normally the editor will be the normal 80 columns wide and the shell window as wide as possible. BTW, if something seems to be missing it may be another script in the same directory the first two script came from. [...] | I had no time yesterday to check on Scott's webpage (or the man pages, | yet) to try to understand how to use properly the tar command, I've | had success when I follow instructions about how to untar a file, | but that has been the most confusing term in my Linux history, The core part of tar is pretty simple: -c means create a new tar file, -t means list the table of contents of the tar file, -x means extract the contents of the tar file. The -f specifies the tar file name. Everything else is just modifiers to tar's behaviour. | The | first time I tried, I was installing a new Linux system to one of my | laptops, so I decided to backup all my files (nothing important, songs, | pictures, a couple of presentations for conferences, videos, a lot of | porn <----(this was a joke, I don't watch those things). So, there was | just like 10 GB, and I proceeded to compress the folders, unsucessfully, | so if the uncompressed folder was 1.2 GB in size, the compressed folder | (.tar) was 1.2 GB too. Videos and images and many modern binary data formats do not compress appreciably; for video and images in particular a _lot_ of effort goes into the data format design to make them as compact as possible, and in consequence the 'z' (gzip) or 'j' (bzip2) compression modes don't manage anything with them. Text (eg code or email), by comparison, compresses really well. | Ok, never mind, I tried to uncompress it, simply | it was not possible, and if double click on it, it just created another | .tar.tar file. The terminal is your friend. "double clicking" on something does whatever your file mangler program thinks should happen. Might be anything:-) If you're typing the command yourself at least you know exactly what got run. [...] | Why to reinvent the wheel? Well, in derivative calculi, the | mathematicians say there are several ways to achieve the same result. | It does no harm to try to get our intellect to do that extra mile, | just to know if is it possible or not. Maybe I can't do it alone, | that's why I asked for help. But of course I will do my homework and | try to read man pages, forums, google sugestions, etc. I'll usually have a go at most wheels myself before doing a lot of research (some is always desirable first up); it exercises the mind and gives you some intuitive grasp of the issues and the objects involved. | And I'm sure, | possible or not, I'll learn a lot of new things in the way to find that | answer. Cameron's Python scripts for example; I'm not just going to | try them out, I'm going to analize them too, and try to understand how | they work (because I'm learning Python too). The splitdir script menationed earlier is Perl, BTW. I'm mostly moved on to Python from Perl - Python is far superior in my opinion, for most things. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <[email protected]> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ Everybody talks about the weather, but does anybody *do* anything about it? - [email protected] (Jim Perry) ------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, please email [email protected] & you will be removed.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
