I recently stumbled upon a little tab key trick in Mac OS X. I already knew you could press the tab key to autocomplete directory names, but I didn't know you could press the tab key additional times to resolve directory name ambiguity. How does it work? When you are typing directory names and paths, which you do with the change directory (cd) command, you can press the tab key to autocomplete the directory names. If two directories have similar names OS X and Linux will complete what you type up to the point one or more additional directory names match. If you continue to press the tab key a list of all possible directory names will display. This lets you determine what you are looking for and continue typing a directory name to resolve the ambiguity.

I'm stunned I didn't know about this neat feature of OS X and Linux, the two platforms I tested.

Check out the quick video demo below to see exactly what I'm talking about.

My Web sites have been hosted on Linux since 2002. About a year ago I moved some sites to a Linux virtual private server at Viviotech and have recently created setting up a new Linux server over at Linode. Linode is a Linux virtual server platform powered by Xen (Wikipedia) and was started by a friend (and past co-worker) of mine. If you're in need of Linux hosting I highly recommend Linode!

I began setting up my Linode with CentOS 4 since I was already familiar with it. But after having conversations with Chris at Linode I decided to nuke the CentOS distro and install Ubuntu. After doing this I ran into an issue the first time I attempted to connect to the server using ssh. Here's an example of what I saw when connecting.

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