Commands by qubyte (3)

  • Puts every word from a file into a new line

    Puts words on new lines, removing additional newlines.


    -1
    < <infile> tr ' \t' '\n' | tr -s '\n' > <outfile>
    qubyte · 2009-07-07 01:17:47 2
  • Grab your bibtex file from CiteULike.

    I love CiteULike. It makes keeping a bibtex library easy and keeps all my papers in one place. However, it can be a pain when I add new entries and have to go through the procedure for downloading the new version in my browser, so I made this to grab it for me! I actually pipe it directly into a couple of SED one liners to tidy it up a bit too. Extremely useful, especially if you make a custom BibTeX script that does this first. That way you can sort a fresh BibTeX file for each new paper with no faf. To use just replace with your CiteULike user name. It doesn't download entries that you've hidden but I don't use that feature anyway.


    -1
    curl -o <bibliography> "http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/<user>"
    qubyte · 2009-03-26 23:08:14 1
  • Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.

    It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially. I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.


    1
    gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=- -q -dNOPAUSE With-Fonts.pdf -c quit | ps2pdf - > No-Fonts.pdf
    qubyte · 2009-03-25 03:46:00 5

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Greets the user appropriately

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Say you're started "xzcat bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program >summary" an hour ago, and you of course forgot to enable progress output (you could've just put "awk 'NR%1000==0{print NR>"/dev/stderr"}{print}'" in the pipeline but it's too late for that now). But you really want some idea of how far along your program is. Then you can run the above command to see how many % along xzcat is in reading the file. Note that this is for the GNU/Linux version of lsof; the one found on e.g. Darwin has slightly different output so the awk part may need some tweaks.

List the URLs of tabs of the frontmost Chrome window in OS X
This also works with Safari if you just change the application name. Replace $ window 1 with $ windows to list the URLs of tabs in all windows instead of only the frontmost window. This also includes titles: $ osascript -e{'set o to""','tell app"google chrome"','repeat with t in tabs of window 1','set o to o&url of t&"\n"&" "&title of t&"\n"',end,end}|sed \$d .

Compress blank lines

Get full directory path of a script regardless of where it is run from
Also resolves symlinks, showing the full path of the link target

Simple way to envoke a secure vnc session through ssh enabled router.
The ip address is of the remote machine running the vncserver. Must log in first to the router then the VNC session. Very nice if you have open-wrt or dd-wrt on your router.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Print just line 4 from a textfile
Prints the 4th line and then quits. (Credit goes to flatcap in comments: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6031/print-just-line-4-from-a-textfile#comment.)

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"

grep certain file types recursively
doesn't do case-insensitive filenames like iname but otherwise likely to be faster

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