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Using rsync and cron to automate incremental backups

Tuesday, February 15, 2011 | En Español

Data loss is a serious concern to both individuals and companies that rely in the use of computers for their every day life or operations. Those who have a Unix based system count with powerful tools to prevent this, such as rsync to backup the information, and cron to make the backup process automated. In previous posts I wrote about the basics of rsync and it's usage as a daemon, as well as the basics of cron. In this post the focus is on the backup functionality of rsync, and its conjoint usage with cron to automate the backup process.

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Categories: Commands, FOSS, Linux, rsync, SSH

Vim and the x11 clipboard

Tuesday, February 08, 2011 | En Español

We can access the clipboard of x11 (the graphical system over which most desktop environments run, such as Gnome and KDE) to share text between Vim and other graphical applications.

x11 have two different global areas where it stores content to be shared between applications, one is known as the "cut-buffer", this is the location where the text that we copy or cut is stored, this is what most people associate with system clipboard. And the other is known as "selection", in x11, whenever we select something with our mouse, we can paste this selection in the location of the mouse cursor by pressing the middle button. Vim can access the content of both storages, get the text from this global storages, or put text on them.

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Categories: FOSS, Vim

Uppercase and lowercase characters in Vim

Sunday, February 06, 2011 | En Español

In Vim, we can turn characters to uppercase, lowercase or invert the case in a few key presses.

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Categories: FOSS, Vim

Configure the syntax highlighting in Vim

Saturday, February 05, 2011 | En Español

When we enable syntax highlighting (by using :syntax enable), Vim will take into consideration the extension of the file to determine the appropriate syntax highlighting rules, and if this fails it will search the contents of the file for specific patterns in order to determine the file type. But if we are working in a temporary file that we don't intend to save, or if we opened, e.g., a file with HTML extension but we find that it contains PHP code in it, we can change the rules of the syntax highlighting.

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Categories: FOSS, Vim