Tag: CLI

Monitor the progress of Unix commands with Pipe Viewer (pv)

I just stumbled across the following post while trying to find out how to copy text from VIM using XSel without losing the selected text. It introduces Pipe Viewer, a Unix utility which is a kind of cat with a progress bar. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 month ago, on February 01, 2010, at 00:02 | No comments

XSel, for command-line operations on X selections

Since I first learned that Windowmaker installs two command-line tools, wxcopy and wxpaste, to play around with X selections, I have wanted to be able to make and use X selections from my Bash shell. wxcopy and wxpaste never did what I expected them to do, so I gave up until recently I learned about all the different X selections. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 month ago, on January 31, 2010, at 23:01 | No comments

Replacing the full contents of a Subversion working (sub)dir

The annoyances that I suffered earlier today during the upgrade of a WordPress plugin made me turn to my favorite text-editor to create a simple script, svn-replace-dir: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 months ago, on January 14, 2010, at 00:01 | No comments

Dumping a bunch of MP3s as WAV files

I just used the following command for converting a directory with a bunch of MP3s to WAV. Does someone know a command that is shorter? I find mine a bit convoluted to say the least. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 months ago, on December 06, 2009, at 22:12 | 1 comment

Tracking WordPress in a Subversion vendor branch

Two months prior to writing a script to upgrade MediaWiki installations using Subversion vendor branches, I wrote something similar for WordPress. It's a little bit more limited and should really incorporate some of the improvements made for the MediaWiki version, but it worked fine so far: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 6 months ago, on September 20, 2009, at 13:09 | 4 comments

Tracking MediaWiki in a Subversion vendor branch

Vendor branches are the proper™ way of merging upstream changes in your web application installations. In Subversion, managing vendor branches isn't so easy as it is in Git. Still, vendor branches make it much easier to track upstream. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 8 months ago, on July 20, 2009, at 14:07 | 2 comments

winepath

I have all these little scripts in my $HOME/bin directory to ease the execution of Windows programs. For instance, I don't like to type the full path to Excel Viewer every time when I need to view an Excel sheet in Linux: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 8 months ago, on June 28, 2009, at 17:06 | No comments

Extracting the MP3 stream from a Flash Video (flv) file

I wanted to convert an Flash Video (flv) file from YouTube to MP3. The first tip I found essentially streamed the original file into a different file: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on March 10, 2009, at 21:03 | 1 comment

My quest for the ultimate Bash prompt

On my new laptop (a Lenovo T61) I was still using the default Gentoo prompt in Bash. This was kind of a shame since my last Gentoo installation (on what is now my sister's Ubuntu machine) had a beautifully customized prompt. It was time to dig up the old escape codes. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on December 05, 2008, at 00:12 | 2 comments

GNU Screen window captions as XTerm tabs

XTerm is my favorite terminal emulator and I love GNU Screen. So, imagine my joy when I found out that Screen can persistently show window captions ([Ctrl+A]: caption always). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on December 04, 2008, at 22:12 | 4 comments