utils

Various useful utils and bash settings

Do not run any of this code without reading and understand it!

Introduction

This is the "local" code I sync to all the nodes I manage. Some of it is not production quality and I wrote some of it decades ago, so there may be better ways or better tools. But it's what I have. I share it in case it's useful to someone else. Some of the ideas may have come out of the Bash Cookbook but some of them went into it. Some of the code came right off the internet, and some was adapted; either should be cited.

I sync it to /opt/bin/ because that's reasonably discoverable and short, system-wide, yet distinct from /usr/local/bin/ or similar. I keep it in Subversion because I like keyword expansion and do not like Git, so I use both svn and git together to only publish what I want to here.

Some of the code or settings might make sense only to me or my environment, so read the code first. In particular, drake is my internal "services" server and hamilton is my mail relay, both are references to authors I like, and not musical. Also, there might be code derived from or handlers for $WORK things, in particular Counterpane (CIS). Since that tech is now defunct I'm not going to worry too much.

Installing

Just clone the repo someplace and use whichever files you want. Do not run any of this code without reading and understand it!

Use

1. Try <PROGRAM> -h or <PROGRAM> --help (works for most, but not all!)
2. Read the code

List

The cl "clean Up script" is probably the most handy tool I have. It's a filter that reads from the GUI clipboard, does some arbitrary thing, then writes the results back to the GUI clipboard. It does almost all the things for me but it's an odd work-flow. I like it because I can make it to arbitrary things using bash or Perl one-liners, and I'm not stuck with 37 different macro languages. Whatever GUI tool I happen to be using: select > copy > ALT-TAB to terminal > cl whatever > ALT-TAB back > paste.

Tools:

• DNSlookup.pl Lookup IPAs and get hostnames
• addheader Add a header at the top of an existing file (very old, arguably crufty and overkill)
• addlt Add line termination to "one line" HTML files
• benford.sh Write a Benford's Law histogram from input (in pure bash)
• caps2esc Map "caps lock" to "Esc" and back (From http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/vim-map-caps-lock-to-escape-409726)
• changelog Trivial system CHANGELOG wrapper to maintain a /root/CHANGELOG.txt (crufty style)
• chperm Set owner.group and mode/permissions on a given file in 1 step
• cl Clean Up script, most wiki markup is Zim syntax, but there is Redmine and Jira in there too and some features require pandoc or other external tools
• colors Echo color codes to the screen to see what works (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html)
• deb wrapper/reminder for various apt* and dpkg commands
• disk-and-partitions Collect data on disks and partitions, just to have
• domath.pl Perform math operations on arbitrary lines of numerical input
• editable_menu_shortcuts Turn Gnome editable menu shortcuts on and off (Obsolete?)
• ff-sess.sh Save/Restore FF sessions, with trivial restore GUI (CLI, using dialog)
• find-group.pl Find a group containing the most users from a users.txt list; useful when considering creating a new groups, to see if you might already have a group containing most of the users
• findlarge Trivial reminder/skeleton for finding "large" files in various locations
• findz Find Zombie processes and parent PID
• fixbadsig Fix BADSIG and other crap in APT repos data (Obsolete?)
• foreground Bring a named window to the foreground in a GUI, else run it (map it to a keystroke in a GUI)
• linesort Trivial in-line sort (sort delimited items within a single line, see also cl)
• mksshconf Trivial script to make ~/.ssh/config file since you can't #INCLUDE
• mount-iso Trivial wrapper to mount an ISO image
• pd Trivial Pandoc Markdown to HTML or PDF wrapper
• pick-one.sh Randomly choose from a list of options
• pivot-by-date.pl Pivot "Count | Date | Key" columnar data by date and key
• pivot-key-value.pl Pivot a key and a value column into a matrix
• pivot-key-values.py Pivot a key and a comma delimited value column into a matrix
• pivot.pl Pivot cells (e.g. columns to rows) in a table
• remote-desktop Fire up a remote desktop session on the remote side (1-time only, no SSH)
• read-maillog.pl Read 'mail.log' files written by Postfix and report details (quite crufty with hard-coded server names!)
• rhythmbox-ratings.pl Merge "old" ratings into a new Rhythmbox XML file
• rhythmbox-rm-badpath.pl Remove duplicate records with bad path from Rhythmbox XML file
• rot13.pl Guess...
• rot47.pl Guess...
• ruler.sh Display a "ruler" across the screen
• sample.pl Sample a log file to create a smaller file
• saveperms Save permissions for a directory structure
• show_package_updates Trivially check for new packages on a Debian-ish system (run from cron, somewhat crufty and experimental)
• star.pl Replace various strings with star "*" to allow use of 'uniq' and other tools (old, crufty, some old CIS bits)
• split-up.sh Split up a file by writing alternating lines to different files
• srpmx Extract files from a source RPM (requires rpm2cpio binary, find that elsewhere)
• sshfsw Trivial SSHFS wrapper (SSH File System = FUSE = Awesome!)
• sysstat Display some system stats (e.g. run from cron periodically) (Obsolete? Probably lots of better tools out there!)
• tattle Log the way this program was called; useful for tracing remote commands such as rsync over SSH.
• tz Trivial script to convert time zones using GNU date
• untar Simple (GNU) tar wrapper
• waitfor Like sleep except for a random integer period in an arbitrary range
• whatdeb (or whatrpm) Quick and Dirty find for installed RPMs or DEBs
• zim2wiki.pl Trivially convert Zim markup to Redmine or Mediawiki

Settings:

These are the settings or configs that I use everywhere, every day.

• settings/README Quick summary of bash init and rc files
• settings/bash_logout Clear the screen on logout to prevent information leaks
• settings/bash_profile Login shell environment settings
• settings/bashrc Subshell environment settings
• settings/gitconfig My typical Git config
• settings/inputrc readline settings
• settings/panam-styling-include.css "Fancy CSS" for use with Pandoc pd wrapper
• settings/run_screen Wrapper script intended to run from a "profile" file to run screen at logon time with a friendly menu
• settings/screenrc Screen RC file
• settings/vimrc VIM RC file

Special & Dangerous

Do not run any of this code without reading and understand it! These can trash your hard drives and destroy all your data! They worked for me, for how I set things up and how I do things. Do not run these without understanding exactly what they do and modifying them to fit your environment! You have been warned.

• grow_mirrored_disk Grow a Linux software mirror after swapping in larger hard drives
• replace_mirrored_disk Replace a failed disk in a Linux software mirror