Jim Hall

5850 points

Minnesota

Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award People's Choice Award 2018 Linux Contributor Club Author

Authored Content

Print double-sided documents at home with this simple Bash script

Use this script and save yourself the hassle and wasted paper of trying to manually load and print double-sided documents.

A graduate degree could springboard you into an open source job

How to work from home like a pro

Transitioning to a home office isn't always easy, but a few simple steps can help you become a pro remote worker.

Why the operating system matters even more in 2017

How to create a personal file server with SSH on Linux

Connecting to a remote Linux system over SSH is just plain easy. Here's how to do it.

Managing processes on Linux with kill and killall

Know how to terminate processes and reclaim system resources with the ps, kill, and killall commands.

Create fancy text for your social media posts with this Gawk script

Add a little style to your status updates by posting text in script, fraktur, or double-strike characters.

How to be a better organization: Top 10 reads for leaders

Get tips and strategies to help you leverage open principles in your organization.

Authored Comments

Jim Hall

7 Jan 2020

What's your favorite terminal emulator?

I also use gnome-terminal most of the time - but sometimes I'll use Cool Retro Term for that 80s throwback feel.

Jim Hall

7 Jan 2020

5 ways to improve your Bash scripts

Great article!

The 'if' statement can come in really handy in all Bash scripts. And for very short 'if' statements, the && and || shortcuts are also useful. For example, I often do this when I need to be sure a directory exists:

[ -d "$1" ] || mkdir --parents "$1"

That statement create the directory only if it doesn't exist. You could also write the statement like this:

[ ! -d "$1" ] && mkdir --parents "$1"

The && means "if the test was true, then do the next statement." And the || means "if the test wasn't true, then do the next statement." You can think of them as "AND" and "OR" at the execution level.