Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

And let it direct your passion with reason.

How Long Does It Take to Observe a Sequence?

There are many interesting while at the same time very tricky problems in statistics. One famous question is that how many steps (expected) does it take to observe a given sequence (e.g. THTH, TTHH), if we flip a balanced coin?

This problem can be solved using (delay) renewal theory …

Select Columns from Structured Text Files

Python pandas

My first choice is pandas in Python. However, below are some tools for quick and dirty solutions.

q

q -t -H 'select c1, c3 from file.txt'

cut

cut -d\t -f1,3 file.txt

awk

awk -F'\t' '{print $1 "\t" $3}' file.tsv 

Note: neither cut …

Sample Lines from a File Using Command Line

NOTE: the article talks about sampling "lines" rather than "records". If a records can occupy multiple lines, e.g., if any field contains a new line (\n), the following tutorial does not work and you have to fall back to more powerful tools such as Python or R.

Let's say …

Account Management in Linux

** Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement! **

Create a User

Both adduser and useradd can be used to create a new user. adduser is interactive while useradd is non-interactive. It is suggested that you use useradd in batch …

Get Group Names on Linux/Unix

Linux

  1. Get information of the staff group.

    $ getent group staff
    staff:x:20:
    
  2. Get group ID of the staff group.

    $ getent group staff | cut -d: -f3
    20
    

Mac

  1. Get information of the staff group.

    $ dscl . -read /Groups/staff
    
  2. Get group ID of the staff group.

    $ dscl . -read /Groups/staff | awk …