pixelbeat__
Re:Ubuntu Rust Coreutils Audit Revealed 44 CVEs
on Thursday April 23, 2026 @10:19AM (#47876077)
A direct link to the Ubuntu post
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-rust-coreutils/8...
Re:Four Column ASCII (2017)
on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:23AM (#47044973)
Some of this elegance discussed from a programmatic point of view
Re:Meta Is Using the Linux Scheduler Designed for Valve's Steam Deck o...
on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @02:42PM (#46368626)
LOL (I used to work for Meta, so appreciate the facetious understatement)
Re:Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
on Thursday October 30, 2025 @06:48AM (#45758485)
It seems dotslash would complement uv well
https://dotslash-cli.com/docs/
DotSlash to get the interpreter for your platform, and uv to get the dependencies.
Perfect for corporate setups with custom mirrors etc.
Re:The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
on Saturday October 25, 2025 @07:22PM (#45707733)
GRUB is mentioned but not detailed.
Here are some details: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/disk/
Re:Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic upd...
on Thursday October 23, 2025 @06:29PM (#45688187)
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/14d24f7a5
That bring GNU date(1) line coverage from 79.8% to 87.1%
Re:Blockdiff: We built our own file format for VM disk snapshots
on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @03:05AM (#45435121)
I see you use flags to determine if a file needs syncing. When we used fiemap within GNU cp we required FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC to get robust operation.
(We have since removed the fiemap code from cp, and replaced it with LSEEK_DATA, LSEEK_HOLE)
Re:Are We Chasing Language Hype over Solving Real Problems?
on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @05:31AM (#45344740)
The benchmark is against unibyte text. You would get more accurate results by doing `export LC_ALL=C` in your benchmark script
Re:Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service
on Thursday July 17, 2025 @08:07AM (#44592400)
Note the terminal -> HTML conversion used to serve wttr.in is based on https://github.com/pixelb/scripts/blob/master/scripts/ansi2h...
Re:TomWright/dasel: Select, put and delete data from JSON, TOML, YAML,...
on Sunday August 18, 2024 @04:58PM (#41285446)
A similar tool for ini files
https://www.pixelbeat.org/programs/crudini/
Re:The Elegance of the ASCII Table
on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @02:38PM (#41049329)
I wrote about ASCII and UTF-8 elegance at:
Re:XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
on Saturday March 30, 2024 @07:11PM (#39879562)
rxzec
Re:GNU Coreutils 9.5 Can Yield 10~20% Throughput Boost For cp, mv and ...
on Thursday March 28, 2024 @03:57PM (#39856585)
The commit with more details on that perf change is:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/fcfba90d0d27a1...
A summary of other changes just released in GNU coreutils 9.5 are:
- mv accepts --exchange to swap files
- env accepts --argv0 to override command name
- od supports half precision floating point formats
- timeout fixes various races
- chmod -R avoids symlink replacement attack
For all the release details see: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2024-0...
Re:Adventures of Linux Userspace at Meta [video]
on Saturday January 06, 2024 @06:26PM (#38896661)
(Hi Giuseppe!)
Right, the standard centos system binaries are used to provision services and manage hardware.
The internal services linking against the runtime libs you mention, are actually linking against about 2000 built from source packages, and are essentially a separate distro (with a distro in this sense being an ABI compatible set of libs running on a kernel)
Re:Adventures of Linux Userspace at Meta [video]
on Saturday January 06, 2024 @06:09PM (#38896540)
Use ldd on any service binary to see that it's linked against a separate distro.
(It's best to use the ldd from the corresponding platform).
There are actually three distros on each host. Current runtime platform, previous runtime platform, centos platform.
Re:Adventures of Linux Userspace at Meta [video]
on Saturday January 06, 2024 @05:26PM (#38896170)
It's worth noting that this discusses the centos based provisioning and hardware management platform.
The actual distribution used to _run_ all Meta backend services is completely separate and built from source (it does share the (non centos) kernel). This is done for flexibility, performance, service isolation reasons
Re:Website Impersonating a Desktop Environment
on Monday January 01, 2024 @06:09AM (#38831058)
Reminds me of my website from 2006 (not entirely reproduced) at https://web.archive.org/web/20060208131821/http://www.pixelb...
Re:A peculiarity of the GNU Coreutils version of 'test' and '['
on Monday December 04, 2023 @03:16PM (#38522467)
Definitely not
Re:Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD
on Monday December 04, 2023 @01:39AM (#38514305)
All the main platforms have realpath(1). It was added to GNU Linux over 10 years ago now, to aid portability, and be a more natural command to access this functionality than readlink(1)
Re:A peculiarity of the GNU Coreutils version of 'test' and '['
on Sunday November 26, 2023 @04:00AM (#38420194)
Yes, macos takes its utils from FreeBSD.
An interesting factoid is that FreeBSD/macos sort(1) was using GNU code until recently, since this is quite tricky to implement. Eventually it was reimplemented for GPL avoidance reasons.
We do consider macos though, and ensure all tests pass on macos for each release
Re:fdupes: Identify or Delete Duplicate Files
on Sunday November 05, 2023 @11:07AM (#38152330)
czkawka is basically a rust port of my python FSlint tool, which I no longer have time to maintain:
https://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/
Re:Base64 Encoding, Explained
on Monday October 23, 2023 @12:58PM (#37988377)
Padding is only required if concatenating / streaming encoded data. I.e. when there are padding chars _within_ the encoded stream.
Padding chars at the end (of stream / file / string) can be inferred from the length already processed, and thus are not strictly necessary.
Note how padding is treated is quite subtle, and has resulted in interesting variations in handling as discussed at: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/361.pdf
Re:Decoded: GNU Coreutils
on Saturday September 09, 2023 @08:02AM (#37444357)
We generally give credit if at all possible. Even if a patch is extensively adjusted, we'll commit under the original author's name
Re:Decoded: GNU Coreutils
on Friday September 08, 2023 @08:57PM (#37441140)
I optimized yes because:
* The fast version is still simple enough
* The general functionality being provided is to output arbitrary data repeatedly, and it can be useful to do this as fast as possible
Re:My favorite C compiler flags during development
on Sunday April 30, 2023 @10:00AM (#35762607)
The gnulib manywarnings module is useful to add as many warnings as appropriate in a portable manner
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/manywar...
That's used in dev mode for various projects like GNU coreutils etc.
When distros etc. are building though these warnings are not used. It's worth stating as I've seen this issue many times, that -Werror at least should not be used by default for third parties building your code
Re:Strlcpy and Strlcat – Consistent, Safe, String Copy and Concatenati...
on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @05:46AM (#35698342)
There have been various attempts to improve on strcpy() etc. The current thinking is that strscpy() is the best general interface to this functionality. See the "improving ... strcpy" section at
https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/string_buffers.htm...
Re:C Strings and my slow descent to madness
on Thursday April 06, 2023 @11:12AM (#35469404)
String handling in C has many gotchas indeed. Here are some of my notes on the subtleties:
https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/string_buffers.htm...
Re:What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @06:12AM (#35067631)
Oh I will reference this from https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/shell_script_mistakes.... where I also advise against this common archaic idiom
Re:Bash Retry Function with Exponential Backoff
on Friday December 30, 2022 @04:30AM (#34183461)
This technique is useful for running things that normally run quickly, but sometimes need more time.
The technique is used extensively in the GNU coreutils test suite, as detailed in the "performance" section at https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html