Tag Archives: Mac

Creating a Flowchart with TikZ and LaTeX

In this post I’ll discuss how to make simple flowcharts in LaTeX using TikZ. Probably the best collection of TikZ examples can be found at TeXample.net, but there are other helpful examples like these two PDFs, here and here. In case you’re wondering, TikZ is a recursive acronym “TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm,” a reminder (in German) that it is not an interactive drawing program.

Continue reading Creating a Flowchart with TikZ and LaTeX

echo versus printf

Quick Note: When you’re bash scripting and you need to pipe some text into some process, you can use echo with the -n flag to suppress the echo‘s complimentary endline , or you can use printf, but using printf is more portable. Some machines implement echo differently and don’t support the -n flag. I found this advice and a longer explanation at this message board.

Working with hdiutil

This is more of a personal note regarding the hdiutil tool.

  • To create a sparse image:
$ hdiutil create NAME -volname NAME -type SPARSE -fs hfs+j
  • To mount the drive:
$ hdiutil attach NAME.sparseimage
  • To add data to the drive:
$ mv data.txt /Volumes/NAME
  • To unmount the drive:
$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/NAME

Then, if we delete the NAME.sparseimage file, it’s gone forever and ever.