Commands by Ben (2)

  • find and grep Word docs

    Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file. (Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.) Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.


    3
    find . -iname '*filename*.doc' | { while read line; do antiword "$line"; done; } | grep -C4 search_term;
    Ben · 2009-07-28 15:49:58 4
  • search manpages on the internets

    manview searches man pages on the internets in case the man command doesn't work for some reason or if you think the man pages in Cornell's flavor of Solaris might differ from yours. It dumps the manpage info from lynx to less, so it ends up looking remarkably like a real manpage. Put it in your .bash_profile or .bashrc, and then you can use it like a regular command: typing "manview ssh" will give you the manpage for ssh.


    0
    manview() { lynx -dump -accept_all_cookies 'http://www.csuglab.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/adm/man.cgi?section=all&topic='"$1" | less; }
    Ben · 2009-03-11 19:02:11 7

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Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Let's make screen and ssh-agent friends
When you start screen as `ssh-agent screen`, agent will die after detatch. If you don't want to take care about files when stored agent's pid/socket/etc, you have to use this command.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find the package that installed a command

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

Remove spaces from filenames - through a whole directory tree.
An example of zsh glob qualifiers.

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

Unite pdf files
pdfunite is a part of the poppler-utils. poppler-utils package is only 150KB. The alternative - pdftk package is 14MB! Install poppler-utils if you need simple pdf operation commands like unite, separate, info, text/html conversions

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