Fast Unix Commands (FUC) is a project that aims to create the world’s fastest Unix commands. Currently, this means rm and cp replacements named rmz and cpz (the ‘z’ stands for “zippy”). When better performance cannot be achieved, the next highest priority is efficiency. In practice, rmz appears to be the fastest file deleter available while cpz wins in most cases, only losing in flat directory hierarchies.

ForkFS is a CLI app that redirects a process’s file operations to a sandbox.

Is it better to have tests that confirm incorrect behavior, or none at all? I’m here to argue the former: tests are valuable even when they assert what a human considers to be an incorrect result. Extending this idea further, a test asserting incorrect behavior should be added in a separate commit before fixing the behavior in another commit.

Gnome Clipboard History (GCH) is a Gnome extension that saves what you’ve copied into an easily accessible, searchable history panel. The primary innovation over existing clipboard managers is the use of a compacting log for persistent storage.

File Tree Fuzzer (FTZZ) is a CLI tool written in Rust that lets you generate pseudo-random directory hierarchies filled with some number of files, each of which can be empty or contain some number of pseudo-random bytes. The pseudo part is important: it means FTZZ will generate the exact same directory hierarchy given the same inputs. This makes FTZZ useful for benchmarking other programs like rm or cp since you can run them again and again on the same exact set of files.

I’m on a mission to find the fastest way to copy and delete files on a modern machine. I thought a quick Google search would reveal the answer, but I only found this Stack Overflow post with people’s opinion on the matter (but no proof), a discussion on what the kernel can do to improve performance, and various articles claiming you should tar directories to copy them faster (there’s no chance of that being faster than a properly written parallel cp implementation).

Google introduced auto deletion for web, YouTube, and location activity back in 2019, but hasn’t come out with official solutions for their other products yet. Notably, gmail and gcal have data that likely isn’t needed after some number of months.

Client-side analytics slow down your website and are inaccurate at best, especially in communities like ours that tend to disable trackers. Until recently, Google Analytics and its equivalents were the best you could do with a static site hosted on Firebase. No more! Firebase Hosting introduced Cloud Logging to address this shortfall.

When it comes to finding a piece of code, GitHub’s search can be less than helpful at times. In stark contrast to that, the public version of Google’s Code Search tooling absolutely kicks ass. cs.android.com and cs.opensource.google are my go-to tools for finding open source Google code, but unfortunately, they’re just that: Google Code Search. If you’re looking for non-Google code, you’re out of luck. Until now.