I have been computing all my life without using a dual pane file manager until one day I decided that having one will greatly enhance my qualify of life. What I had in mind was something that will make my life easier in the copying or moving of files from 1 directory to another.By dual pane (or twin-pane) file manager, I mean a file manager that displays two directories side by side (one active, one passive). The term is confusing because often a dual pane file manager has a third pane that lets you enter commands to execute on the active directory.

Now that I am back from vacation, I had to take care of some chores, like uploading the pictures taken with my digital camera.I stepped out during the long upload process (400+ pictures). When I returned, it was already done. To just make sure all pictures are now on the server, I wanted to count the number of files in the targetdir directory.$ ls -1 targetdir | wc -l454

I want to revisit a topic: how to tail a log file. My earlier posts discussed the use of tail and less commands to tail a log file, and multitail if you need to tail multiple files at once.This followup article discussed two other ways to tail a log file: the use of the most command, and to tail within emacs.

If you are using Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc), you are probably familiar with the apt-get update followed by the apt-get upgrade routine. That is what I regularly use to upgrade ALL packages that have an update available.But what if you only want to upgrade certain individual packages?apt-get upgrade will upgrade ALL or nothing. So, that is out of the question.