Regular expressions

A regular expression, or regex, is a sequence of characters that represents a pattern. They are commonly used in code and text processing. For instance,…

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Proxy servers

A proxy server sits between a client and one or more other servers. This article briefly looks at forward and reverse proxies.

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MIME types

A MIME type identifies the type of a file. When a server sends resources to a web browser it includes the MIME type of each…

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Binary (base-2) numbers

To understand IPv4 addresses and networking you need to understand binary numbers. Put simply, you need to know why the decimal number 255 translates to…

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MailDir and Mdbox

On cPanel servers emails are stored in one of two formats: Maildir or Mdbox. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. As a quick summary, the…

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Globbing

Unix shells use certain characters as wildcards. These so-called globbing characters are similar to but different from regular expressions. Globbing is used purely for file…

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The PATH variable

Linux systems use lots of environment variables. Among others, there are variables that store your username ($USER) and the current directory ($PWD). One of the…

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