Category Archives: GNU

The GNU project, a free operating system project.

Makefile Template for a Shared Library in C (with Explanations)

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Last updated on October 28, 2019

tl;dr: Save the following file as Makefile and change the source files to the ones that you intend.

# Makefile template for a shared library in C
# https://www.topbug.net/blog/2019/10/28/makefile-template-for-a-shared-library-in-c-with-explanations/

CC = gcc  # C compiler
CFLAGS = -fPIC -Wall -Wextra -O2 -g  # C flags
LDFLAGS = -shared   # linking flags
RM = rm -f   # rm command
TARGET_LIB = libtarget.so  # target lib

SRCS = main.c src1.c src2.c  # source files
OBJS = $(SRCS:.c=.o)

.PHONY: all
all: ${TARGET_LIB}

$(TARGET_LIB): $(OBJS)
	$(CC) ${LDFLAGS} -o $@ $^

$(SRCS:.c=.d):%.d:%.c
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -MM $< >$@

include $(SRCS:.c=.d)

.PHONY: clean
clean:
	-${RM} ${TARGET_LIB} ${OBJS} $(SRCS:.c=.d)

The above code snippet is also available on GitHub gist.

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A ~/.inputrc for Humans

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Last updated on April 14, 2024

~/.inputrc is the user configuration file of GNU readline, which provides customizable command line user interfaces for many important interactive programs, such as Bash and Python interactive shell. However, many of its useful features are disabled by default. In this post, we will walk through a decent ~/.inputrc file to release the power of readline.

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Parallelize make by Default

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Last updated on December 13, 2016

The make utility is an standard utility on POSIX systems (GNU/Linux, macOS, etc.) that update files derived from other files, such as compiling source files to their binary forms. It is widely supported and used across different fields such as organizing and building C/C++/Fortran projects, building Sphinx documentation, etc.

The most popular implementation of the make utility is probably GNU make, which is usually the default make program on various GNU/Linux distributions. (On macOS, the version of the default GNU make is pretty old. Please consult Install and Use GNU Command Line Tools on macOS/OS X for a newer version.) It adds one very important feature besides the standard make specification: parallelization. The command line option -j can be used to specify the maximum number of jobs that it is allowed to run simultaneously. However, it is quite annoying to type up this option every time when using it—we want a setting such that the CPU can be fully utilized by default. To achieve this goal, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc if you use bash or ~/.zshrc if you use zsh:

# set MAKEFLAGS
if type nproc &>/dev/null; then   # GNU/Linux
  export MAKEFLAGS="$MAKEFLAGS -j$(($(nproc)-1))"
elif type sysctl -n hw.ncpu &>/dev/null; then   # macOS, FreeBSD
  export MAKEFLAGS="$MAKEFLAGS -j$(($(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)-1))"
fi

The code above sets the envrionmental variable MAKEFLAGS, which specifies the command line arguments of any invoked make subprocesses. It is set such that the maximum number of jobs that is allowed to be run simultaneously is equal to the number of available CPU cores minus 1. In this way, the hardware is more or less fully utilized when using make, with one CPU core left for other potential tasks on the system.

Attachment Reminder in Emacs message-mode

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Last updated on December 13, 2016

When sending out an email, sometimes we just forgot to attach the attachments. An attachment reminder can largely prevent this: You are asked to confirm whether you have forgotten the attachments if your message body shows that you may need one. However, Emacs by default does not provide such a feature in its mail composing mode message-mode, which is used in email clients such as gnus and mu4e. Here is an attachment reminder based on this comment:

(defun my-message-current-line-cited-p ()
  "Indicate whether the line at point is a cited line."
  (save-match-data
    (string-match (concat "^" message-cite-prefix-regexp)
                  (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))

(defun my-message-says-attachment-p ()
  "Return t if the message suggests there can be an attachment."
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (save-match-data
      (let (search-result)
        (while
            (and (setq search-result (re-search-forward "\\(attach\\|pdf\\|file\\)" nil t))
                 (my-message-current-line-cited-p)))
        search-result))))

(defun my-message-has-attachment-p ()
  "Return t if the message has an attachment."
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (save-match-data
      (re-search-forward "<#part" nil t))))

(defun my-message-pre-send-check-attachment ()
  (when (and (my-message-says-attachment-p)
             (not (my-message-has-attachment-p)))
    (unless
        (y-or-n-p "The message suggests that you may want to attach something, but no attachment is found. Send anyway?")
      (error "It seems that an attachment is needed, but none was found. Aborting sending."))))
(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'my-message-pre-send-check-attachment)

If “attach”, “pdf” or “file” are in the message you are sending, a confirmation would be required to confirm the attachments if they are not attached.

A Better ls Command

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Last updated on April 14, 2024

The ls command is a command to list files on a UNIX-like system. It is probably one of the most used command. However, a plain ls command without any polishing may look really “plain”. Here, we will slightly configure this command to make it more usable:

  • More colorful output
  • Automatic pagination for long file lists
  • File type indication
  • Human readable sizes
  • Natural ordering of files

Screenshots:

Output of ls before configuration

Output of ls before configuration

Output of ls after configuration

Output of ls after configuration

ls pagination

Pagination for ls

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Prevent Browser Processes Started by Emacs from Being Killed When Emacs Exits on GNU/Linux

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Last updated on November 16, 2016

The function browse-url in Emacs can be used to start a browser process to visit a given URL. It is used by many packages such as org-mode, mu4e, etc. However, on GNU/Linux, by default a new browser process started by browse-url will be killed if the Emacs process exits. To prevent the browser process from being killed, add the following code to your Emacs init file:

(when (and (executable-find "setsid") (executable-find "gnome-open"))
  (setq browse-url-browser-function
        (lambda (url &optional ignored)
          (start-process "" nil "setsid" "gnome-open" url))))

You will need both the setsid and gnome-open commands available. Note that replacing gnome-open with xdg-open is not guaranteed to work.

Installing Emacs from Source: Avoid the Conflict of ctags

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Last updated on December 10, 2016

If installing Emacs from source, an executable named ctags will be installed by default. However, many systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and macOS often already have an executable named ctags installed, such as Exuberant Ctags or Universal Ctags, which then causes conflict. To avoid this conflict, we can use the switch --program-transform-name='s/^ctags$/ctags.emacs/' when running configure to rename ctags to ctags.emacs. For example:

cd /path/to/emacs-source
mkdir build && cd build
../configure --program-transform-name='s/^ctags$/ctags.emacs/'

After that, running make install will install the Emacs ctags executable as ctags.emacs.

Speed Test: Check the Existence of a Command in Bash and Zsh

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Last updated on December 10, 2016

In both bash and zsh, there are multiple methods to check whether a command exists. In this post, a set of speed tests will be performed on them to find the fastest way in each of the two shells (NOT to compare the two shells). We will test 5 different methods (foobar is the command to test for existence in the list):

  • type foobar &> /dev/null
  • hash foobar &> /dev/null
  • command -v foobar &> /dev/null
  • which foobar &> /dev/null
  • (( $+commands[foobar] )) (zsh only)

All the methods listed above will have a return status of zero if the command foobar exists, otherwise non-zero. That is, after replacing testing-command by any of the commands listed above, you can test the existence of the command foobar by executing testing-command && echo exist || echo non-exist.

Throughout this post, ls will be the command that is used for testing existence, which does exist on the system which runs the tests. The test environment is Debian Jessie with bash 4.3.30 and zsh 5.0.7 on Intel Xeon processor E3-1240 v3 (8 MB Cache, 3.4 GHz). The test scripts are also available at the end of the post.

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Emacs: Disable Certain Pairs for electric-pair-mode

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Last updated on December 10, 2016

In GNU Emacs, electric-pair-mode is a minor mode for auto closing pairs of (curly) braces/brackets/quotes, which was first introduced in Emacs 24. However, up till now, it still has not provided an easy option to disable a certain pair—we need to make use of electric-pair-inhibit-predicate. To disable a certain pair, such as double quotes, we can add the following to ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(setq electric-pair-inhibit-predicate
      `(lambda (c)
         (if (char-equal c ?\") t (,electric-pair-inhibit-predicate c))))

To disable a certain pair for a specific mode, for example to disable the pairing of {} in web-mode (to allow web-mode to better handle the auto pairing of the template tags {% %}), we can add the following to ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

;; disable {} auto pairing in electric-pair-mode for web-mode
(add-hook
 'web-mode-hook
 (lambda ()
   (setq-local electric-pair-inhibit-predicate
               `(lambda (c)
                  (if (char-equal c ?{) t (,electric-pair-inhibit-predicate c))))))

For more information, please move onto the documentation of the variable electric-pair-inhibit-predicate.