Linux Tips

Damn Small Linux on Dell Latitude D620

I installed DSL onto a USB drive, and tried to boot linux off the drive. The kernel would always panic, regardless of the cheat codes I tried. Next, I tried burning DSL to a CD-ROM. Booting the CD-ROM with the 'dsl acpi=off' switch got me to the desktop. I was able to mount the HD, but not see the USB drive. After trying all sorts of things to mount the USB drive, I decided to try turning off USB emulation in the BIOS. This worked and I was able to copy the files from the NTFS partition to my 1 GB FAT USB stick.

tr

I like to use 'tr' to create long constant names in Java. When CheckStyle complains that '2004' is a magic number, I like to replace it with something more interesting than 'YEAR_2004'. I haven't found a way to do this inside of IntelliJ but having a Bash shell open makes this easy.

$ echo "International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition" | tr '\ -' '__' | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]
INTERNATIONAL_YEAR_TO_COMMEMORATE_THE_STRUGGLE_AGAINST_SLAVERY_AND_ITS_ABOLITION

Script to colorize source code using vim

• colorize.sh [view] [download]

Create a .tar.gz archive

tar -pczf name_of_your_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory

Unzip and extract an archive

gzip -drv ruby-1.8.3.tar.gz
tar -xf ruby-1.8.3.tar

Copy files from work to this website

rsync -avz -e ssh --rsync-path=/usr/bin/rsync /u/eggebr/tmp/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10/ egge@theeggeadventure.com:/home/egge/fonts
rsync -avz -e ssh --rsync-path=/usr/bin/rsync /u/eggebr/.vimrc egge@theeggeadventure.com:/home/egge/

Backup [ccnorthjersey.org]

$ rsync -avz -e ssh ccnorthj@ccnorthjersey.org:/home/ccnorthj /cygdrive/c/Backup/ccnorthjersey.org

Backup theeggeadventure.com

$ rsync -avz -e ssh egge@theeggeadventure.com:/home/egge /cygdrive/c/Backup/theeggeadventure.com

[Rebuild a Debian Kernel]

Get a stack trace from a running Python process

This will print the stack, and then the process will exit. I'm not sure how to get the stack without killing the process.

 kill -SIGINT 28350

My bash prompt

Note - it's important to that the non-printing characters are enclosed in "\[" and "\[" so bash can do line wraps properly.

  export PS1="\[\e[32m\]\h\[\e[0m\]@\[\e[34m\]\W$\[\e[0m\] "

Use sed to remove ANSI colors

echo -e '\e[31mfoo\e[0m' | sed 's/^[\[[0-9]\+m//g'

Note, I couldn't figure out how to make sed accept a \e or \033 for an escape character, so I typed 'Ctrl-V Ctrl-[' in my shell to create an escape character inline.

Redirecting sudo output

 Long answer: http://www.dagnall.net/blog/?p=41

 Short answer:

  sudo -u someuser /bin/bash -c \"command > out.txt\"
  

Touch all open files in a directory

lsof +D $PWD | awk '{print $9}' | uniq | grep -v NAME | touch

Missing font problem

• Problem: I get this warning when running xemacs on a Linux WS3 host:

Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset

I don't have this issue on RH 8.0 hosts or SunOS.

• Fix: The problem is the LANG environment variable.

It's probably set to en_US.UTF-8. Change it to en_US.iso88591, and the warning should go away. Or else find some fonts that are UTF-8 encoded, I suppose.

so you can set your .envrc or just do a

setenv LANG en_US.iso88591

Search & Replace text in a batch of files

for f in `ffind "*.java" | xargs grep -l "foo"`; do sed -e "s/foo/bar/" ${f} > tmp; mv -f tmp ${f} ; done

Verify all the jar's in the classpath exist

# Warn if any jar's are missing
echo $CLASSPATH | tr ":" "\n" | xargs cksum > /dev/null