Sufyan bin Uzayr, Freelance Writer, Graphic Artist and Photographer, www.sufyan.co.nr

Linux

Running processes in background

If you wish to run a process in the background, simply affix '&' at the end of the command. For instance,

#pcq.sh &

Note that the above command will be killed if you close the Terminal. If you want the command to continue running even after you close the Terminal, use the 'nohup' command. For example:

#nohup pcq.sh &

The above command will continue to run in the background even if you close the Terminal session. To end it, simply pass the KILL command.

The 'time' command

The 'time' command can help in timing the execution of a program. To do so, simply enter 'time' at the prompt followed by the command, as shown below:

#time

For example, if you wish to run a stopwatch:

#time cat

In order to stop the watch, hit Ctrl+D. You will then be shown the time elapsed since the command was initially issued.

Mozilla Firefox

Tagging Bookmarks in Firefox

You can organize your Firefox bookmarks by tagging them with keywords. Once you add a keyword as a tag, such as 'political' in the example below, Firefox will automatically offer it as a tag keyword for all your future bookmarks.

You can then use the keywords in the address bar and Firefox will bring up all bookmarked sites associated with that tag.

Setting up default applications

You can specify the default applications for your web browser under the Applications tab in Preferences/Settings. For example, if you click a 'mailto:' link in Firefox under Windows, it will most probably bring up Microsoft Outlook or your operating system's default mail program. If you wish to change this setting, simply specify a new mail program in the email client option. You can even choose to use web based GMail or Yahoo! Mail for this purpose. This option can be set for audio, video, documents such as Word/OpenOffice/PDF, images, ZIP files and many other file types.

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