Faster techniques for grabbing lines of a file and doing text manipulation and arithmetic via shell (or other) scripting? [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon on May 9, 2008 - 20 answers

In Linux, what's the simplest way to take a podcast RSS file as input, and output a file containing just the URLs of all the MP3s enclosed in the RSS file? Difficulty: the method must only Bash + GNU tools, Python or Perl, with no non-standard add-on libraries or dependencies required.
posted by Jimbob on May 10, 2007 - 22 answers

Linux / Ubuntu / Gnome question - how do I tell Gnome "Hey, the jpg you're using as desktop wallpaper has been updated with a new image. Go reload it and display the new version?" in a Python or Bash script? [more inside]
posted by Jimbob on Sep 26, 2006 - 6 answers

*nix shell "best practices" anyone? [more inside]
posted by furtive on May 31, 2006 - 9 answers

Is there a way to set an environment variable in the unix shell from a python script? Can I set a variable in the shell that executes that same script? For that matter, is there a way for any script to do this? [more inside]
posted by kuatto on Apr 7, 2006 - 8 answers