Every shell-scripting tutorial recommends find ... -exec cmd {} \; for “do this command on every matching file.” It’s the classic, obvious pattern. It’s also dramatically slower than the alternatives once your file count goes past a few hundred — …
I once had a cron job that was supposed to send a “good morning” digest at 7 AM. It went out at 12:30 AM for two weeks before anyone complained. The server was in UTC. The cron line said 0 …
Every developer eventually accepts that their dotfiles are a real piece of personal infrastructure. The shell config, the editor config, the git config, the tmux conf, the ssh config — these accumulate years of small decisions, and re-configuring them on …
Last quarter I had a long-running bash daemon that needed to start as root (to bind a privileged port and read a key file in /etc) and then immediately drop to an unprivileged user before doing anything else. The …
Last spring I was cleaning out an old VPS and found three crontab entries pointing at scripts that didn’t exist anymore. Two had been deleted during a refactor in 2022; one was a project I’d rm -rf‘d a year …
Apple switched the default macOS shell from bash to zsh in Catalina (2019). Most people changed nothing and have been on zsh ever since for interactive use. But if you look at /etc/shells, run which sh, or open …
The interesting thing about WordPress malware in 2026 is that most of it doesn’t try to hide on disk anymore. Filesystem scanners catch the obvious things — random PHP at webroot, .hph extension shadows, polyglot images. The newer payloads live …
Most production bash scripts I’ve inherited start with a comment block, then dive straight into echos and mkdirs and cps. They look fine. They run fine, most of the time. They fail mysteriously the one time it …