The “Entering/Leaving…” messages when invoking another make by a make is kind of annoying. Is it possible to suppress these messages and how to suppress them? For GNU make, it is controlled by options: -w, –print-directory Print a message containing the working directory before and after other processing. This may be useful for tracking down…
Can I get the fclose Q2A theme used here? I’d like to share it but I also want to keep my site a little bit unique. What about this: you can get the css and qa-theme.php files, but need to find or design your own icons for the site (I believe some icons from other…
How to replace tabs with spaces in Emacs? You can first select the regions of text for converting/replacing, then run M-x untabify to replace all tabs with appropriate number of spaces. There is also a M-x tabify for replacing sequences of spaces to tabs. There are also commands to convert tabs to spaces or vice…
How to get the directory path and file name from a absolute path in C on Linux? For example, with “/foo/bar/baz.txt”, it will produce: “/foo/bar/” and “baz.txt”. You can use the APIs basename and dirname to parse the file name and directory name. A piece of C code: #include <libgen.h> #include <string.h> char* local_file =…
I had a TP-Link TL-WN725N v2 USB wireless adapter. But it seems the kernels in Fedora 19 have not yet included drivers for it. How to install drivers for TL-WN725N v2 on Fedora 19? The driver is under development. You can find the source here and in the drivers/staging in the Linux kernel. If you…
utop is an improved toplevel for OCaml supporting line edition, history, real-time and context sensitive completion, colors and etc. utop is convenient to use. However, the key bindings are a little bit different from the ones with GNU readline. What are all the key bindings? The #utop_bindings command will print all the key bindings. Here…
The –no-print-directory option of make tells make not to print the message about entering and leaving the working directory. However, how to specify the –no-print-directory inside the Makefile itself? Add this line to the Makefile: MAKEFLAGS += –no-print-directory You can also set MAKEFLAGS in a makefile, to specify additional flags that should also be in…
How to get the native assembly code (e.g. x86-64 asm) for OCaml code generated by the native ocamlopt compiler? To get the assembly code for an OCaml program, add these parameters to ocamlopt: -S -inline 20 -nodynlink An example is as follows. The OCaml program: $ cat not.ml let not x = ((x – 1)…
I frequently hear that cin is significantly slower than scanf in C++. Is this true? And how to improve the efficiency of cin? It is really nice to use most of time. One discussion about that cin is very slow is here: http://apps.topcoder.com/forums/?module=Thread&threadID=508058&start=0&mc=7 In short: cin is not always slower (can be faster actually, see…
What is the x86-64 calling convention by gcc? The calling convention of the System V AMD64 ABI is followed on GNU/Linux. The registers RDI, RSI, RDX, RCX, R8, and R9 are used for integer and memory address arguments and XMM0, XMM1, XMM2, XMM3, XMM4, XMM5, XMM6 and XMM7 are used for floating point arguments. For…
What is the strcmp and strncmp implementation in glibc? strcmp implementation in glibc 2.16: string/strcmp.c /* Copyright (C) 1991, 1996, 1997, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of the GNU C Library. The GNU C Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU…
ANSI C is a standardized version of the C programming language that was introduced in 1989 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The ANSI C standard defines the syntax and semantics of the C language, including its grammar. In this post, we will explore the ANSI C grammar in more detail. The ANSI C…
The encoding of x86 and x86-64 instructions is well documented in Intel or AMD’s manuals. However, they are not quite easy for beginners to start with to learn encoding of the x86-64 instructions. In this post, I will give a list of useful manuals for understanding and studying the x86-64 instruction encoding, a brief introduction…
Since version 7, RHEL has only x86-64 versions. The same thing happens to CentOS 7. In CentOS 7/EPEL, there is only package for Wine x86-64. However, many Windows .exe files are 32-bit. Even there are 64-bit versions for some software, their installation file is 32-bit. And for some certain software such as Office 2007, 32-bit…
As you may know, Adobe stopped supporting the NPAPI version of Flash on Linux and the latest NPAPI version of Flash player at version 11.2 released back in 2012 will only receive security fixes. Even the security fixes to the 11.2 version of the Flash Plugin your Firefox is using will end on May 4,…
It is common practice to calculate the checksums for files to check its integrity. For large files, the checksum computation is slow. Now I am wondering why it is so slow and whether choosing another tool will be better. In this post, I try three common tools md5sum, sha1sum and crc32 to compute checksums on…
You may already well know “Linux” and may also use the “operating system based on the Linux kernel” directly or indirectly (you are indirectly using it now as this site is hosted on Linux). But how should we name the OS based on Linux? You may know there is GNU/Linux naming controversy. Different people have…
In Extending a Mounted Ext4 File System on LVM in Linux, we introduced how to extend a mounted ext4 filesystem on LVM Logical volume by adding a new physical volume. It is also common to shrink an ext4 file system as to spare some disk space. In this post, I will discuss how to shrink…
My best favorite disk partition table manipulation tools are cfdisk/fdisk on Linux. However, for large disks, cfdisk/fdisk (of the versions by this post is written) will just give up with a message suggesting GPT partition table format and using GNU parted like WARNING: The size of this disk is 6.0 TB (6001042391040 bytes). DOS partition…
Error handling and resource management are pervasive in programs. RAII originated in C++ is great. With RAII, it is much easier to write easy-to-read code that allocats/deallocats resources in the constructor/destructors. By representing a resource with a local object, we are sure that local object’s destructor will release the resource and will not forget to…