Introduction One particular frustration with the UNIX shell is the inability to easily schedule multiple, concurrent tasks that fully utilize CPU cores presented on modern systems. The example of focus in this article is file compression, but the problem rises with many computationally intensive tasks, such as image/audio/media processing, password cracking and hash analysis, database Extract, Transform, and Load, and backup activities.

Introduction The btrfs filesystem has taunted the Linux community for years, offering a stunning array of features and capability, but never earning universal acclaim. Btrfs is perhaps more deserving of patience, as its promised capabilities dwarf all peers, earning it vocal proponents with great influence. Still, none can argue that btrfs is unfinished, many features are very new, and stability concerns remain for common functions.

Killing Zombies! Also known as “defunct” or “dead” process – In simple words, a Zombie process is one that is dead but is present in the system’s process table. Ideally, it should have been cleaned from the process table once it completed its job/execution but for some reason, its parent process didn’t clean it up properly after the execution.

For users who are looking to try something new, or who are tired of their Mac OS or Windows operating systems, now just might be the time to switch to something else. The Mac OS system currently uses a UNIX core, which would make switching from Mac OS to Linux a fairly smooth transition. Windows users, on the other hand, will need to make some adjustments. The following tutorial will compare the Linux operating system to Microsoft Windows.

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  If you've written any amount of bash code, you've likely come across the trap command. Trap allows you to catch signals and execute code when they occur. Signals are asynchronous notifications that are sent to your script when certain events occur. Most of these notifications are for events that you hope never happen, such as an invalid memory access or a bad system call. However, there are one or two events that you might reasonably want to deal with. There are also "user" events available that are never generated by the system that you can generate to signal your script. Bash also provides a psuedo-signal called "EXIT", which is executed when your script exits; this can be used to make sure that your script executes some cleanup on exit.