Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Custom Search in Chrome

At home, I have little use for domain-specific search engines---Google usually gives me the right answer. But, at work, Google doesn't have access to much of the information I need. Yes, we have an intranet search, but it is of little-to-no help when I'm looking for a particular bug, ticket or code revision. Firefox has "bookmarklets" which let you trigger a custom search based on a keyword. Though it's less obvious, Chrome lets you do the same thing via its "search engine" configuration. In the "Manage Search Engines" window, enter a keyword and a url and a "%s" for where the search string should be substituted. Then, finding a particular bug can be as easy as typing "b 12345" in the omnibox. I got this tip from Lifehacker.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Nohup or Disown?

In the past when I've started long-running jobs, I've used nohup. But, what if you forget to use nohup or find that a job is taking longer than expected? Today, I learned about disown which allows you to easily prevent a process from being killed when the parent is killed. Ksplice provides a detailed tutorial on using disown. The quick-and-dirty version is:

$ long-running-process.sh
^Z
[1]+  Stopped     sh long-running-process.sh
$ bg
$ disown %1