Who Owns Your Dot Files

The recommended way to install or update rust is with rustup. And by default, rustup modifies your shell startup files to put itself on PATH. And rustup is by no means the only example, it’s just the one I encountered most recently. This is extremely bad default behavior. My plea…

Bash the Cache

If you develop executable programs you probably invoke them from one location, then install them to another for ongoing use. And the moment you do that the bash hash cache will bite you. The bash documentation says this: If the name is neither a shell function nor a builtin, and…

Debian JRE Package Bug

In attempting to install openjdk on Debian I ran into the following error: Setting up openjdk-17-jre-headless:amd64 (17.0.13+11-2~deb12u1) ... the java command requires a mounted proc fs (/proc). The /proc directory exists and is populated, so why does this error occur? The posti…

Linux Jails With VNET

Look online for information about how to run a Linux jail with VNET and you’ll find very few resources. And of course some of the advice appears obsolete. I managed to do this recently with FreeBSD 14.1 and Debian 12, and here is the setup. The instructions in the FreeBSD Handboo…

mawk Is Not awk

Today I had occasion to use mawk instead of awk with a command that read lines from standard input, manipulates them, and prints them to standard output. Simple enough, or so I thought. I’ve had this code in production for years. Today I fired it up under mawk and behold: no outp…