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Welcome to the LinuxFocus September/October 2001 issue

Democracy, government by the people? At least this is what the Greek word originally meant but where are we today? For the USA we should probably say that Democracy is where money rules. It looks like the "right" to make profit becomes increasingly more important than the freedom to exchange ideas and information. Dmitry Sklyarov is facing charges higher than armed robbers and child molesters. What did he do? He wrote a piece of software that had the potential to reduce the profit of Adobe and other companies. The device is still legal in most countries and was legal until one year ago in the US.
It would allow you to do with E-books what you can do today with paper books in any print-shop around the corner: copy pages from a book.

Big corporations are managing to get laws in place that have the potential to severely restrict everybody's freedom and allow a few individuals to make enormous profits.

Just a few centuries ago people, science and the whole society was suffering because a few monarchs and dictators had everything and could do anything. Are we heading back in that direction?

How is it possible that laws which restrict the freedom to exchange digital speech are being put in place?

• It increases extremely the profit of very few individuals and they are very eager to push such laws through.
• Computers are fairly new and most people still can't relate to thoughts written down as software and digital information and speech.

Software Development

• Avoiding security holes when developing an application - Part 5: race conditions , by Frédéric Raynal, Christophe Blaess, Christophe Grenier
  
  This article focuses on problems related to multitasking and exclusive access of resources.

UNIX Basics

• Shell Programming , by Katja Socher and Guido Socher
  
  The shell has its own quite powerful programming language. This article explains how to write shell programs also known as shell scripts.

System Administration

• Psionic Portsentry 1.1, the defender of the ports , by Georges Tarbouriech
  
  Portsentry is a Intrusion Detection System for monitoring TCP/UDP ports.

• E-mail over UUCP , by Guido Socher
  
  UUCP is an old protocol but it is very good to handle E-mail over dialup connections.

Graphics

• XMRM : Morphing with Linux , by Yves Ceccone
  
  XMRM (Multi Resolution Morphing for X) is a morphing program that allows one to create an mpeg video based on the the transformation from one image into another one.

Applications

• Analyzing your internet applications' log files , by Egon Willighagen
  
  This article describes a new log file analyzer by LogReport.org : Lire.

• Using XML and XSLT to build LinuxFocus.org , by Egon Willighagen
  
  This article describes a XML based database system

The LinuxFocus Tip

How to copy a whole tree of files and directories?
Apart from using a filemanager (like e.g mc, ...) you can use the following commands. All of them copy the current directory ("."), including subdirectories, into a destination directory:

• cp -Rpv .   /some/destdir
  Disadvantage: It fails on special files such as the files in /dev
• find .   -print | cpio -dump -V /some/destdir
  Disadvantage: None.
  You can even copy softlinks on directories including their content if you use:
  find . -follow -print | cpio -dump -V /some/destdir
  To not copy files ending in ".bak" use egrep as a filter:
  find . -follow -print | egrep -v "\.bak$" | cpio -dump -V /some/destdir
  
• tar -cvf /tmp/t.tar   .
  cd /some/destdir
  tar -xvf /tmp/t.tar
  rm /tmp/t.tar
  Disadvantage: A temporary file is created.
• tar cf - . | (cd /some/destdir ; tar xf -)
  or to a remote host:
  tar cf - . | ssh host "(cd /some/destdir ; tar xf -)"
  Disadvantage: It does not work if you use tcsh as a shell.

© 2001 LinuxFocus
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