What is the most useful script you ve written for everyday life

Question

Just wondering what little scripts programs people here have written that helps one with his or her everyday life  aka not work related    Anything goes  groundbreaking or not  For me right now  it s a small python script to calculate running pace given distance and time elapsed

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I have a Python script that automatically runs when I plug my digital camera in.

It copies all of the pictures off the card on the camera, backs them up, and then uploads them to Flickr.

The upload-to-Flickr piece comes from uploadr.py (which I can't take credit for).

Here's the Python code for unloading the camera. It recurses through SRCDIR and names each image with the date & time before copying the images to DESTDIR.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import string
import time
import shutil

###################################################
__SRCDIR__ = "/mnt/camera"
__DESTDIR__ = "/home/pictures/recent"
###################################################
def cbwalk(arg, dirname, names):
    sdatetime = time.strftime("%y%m%d%H%M")
    for name in names:
        if string.lower(name[-3:]) in ("jpg", "mov"):
            srcfile = "%s/%s" % (dirname, name)
            destfile = "%s/%s_%s" % (__DESTDIR__, sdatetime, name)
                    print destfile
            shutil.copyfile( srcfile, destfile)
###################################################
if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.path.walk(__SRCDIR__, cbwalk, None)

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A bash script called up so that if I m in  a very deeply nested path somewhere and I want to go  up  N directories  I can type up N      bin bash LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P   For example    a very deeply nested path somewhere gt  up 4  a very gt     NB by gmatt   Working off the great work above  it can be extended to a back function by placing the following into your bashrc   function up      LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P export MPWD  P    function back      LIMIT  1 P  MPWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P   P      done cd  P export MPWD  P

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A python script that does a filewalk and prints my directory tree sorted by disk usage

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A simple all around shell function  Just when I get too lazy to think about what I am trying to do   Really useful when I am just browsing around some random directory  and I have to switch from ls  to cd  to less constantly   en     if    -z  1      then ls      elif    -d  1      then cd  1  elif    -f  1      then less  lt  1 fi

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Super remote reset button  A rack of super special simulation hardware  backin the days when a room full of VME crates did less than your GPU  that a user on the other side of the world would crash in the early hours of the morning  It took an hour to get into the lab and through security   But we weren t allowed to connect to the super special controller or modify the hardware  The solution was an old DEC workstation with an epson dot matrix printer  tape a plastic ruler to the paper feed knob  position the printer near the reset button  Log in to the WS as a regular user  no root allowed  all external ports locked down   print a document with 24blank lines - which rotated the paper feed knob and the ruler pressed over the reset on the super special hardware

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At some point in the distant past I decided to put all the files for my web host s public html directory into a subversion repository   Then I wrote a script which    Creates  mounts  and formats a RAM disk  Exports the trunk of the repository into the RAM disk  Calls rsync to upload any changed files from the RAM disk to my hosting provider  I use a public private key pair to save me from typing my login information each time  Unmounts the RAM disk    Thus  pushing updates from the repository to the server is literally a  one touch  operation   What is most satisfying about the script is that  initially  it was more of a shell scripting exercise than a Grand Project  However  it has probably saved me countless hours of work and makes the prospect of updating a website almost stress-free  maybe more than any other piece of software on my computer

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A simply Python script that converts line endings from Unix to Windows that I stuck in my system32 directory  It s been lost to the ages for a few months  now  but basically it d convert a list of known text-based file types to Windows line endings  and you could specify which files to convert  or all files  for a wildcard list

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A few years ago I wrote a winforms app with the help of a few win32 api s to completely lock myself out of my computer for an hour so that it would force me to go and exercise  Because I was lazy  No    because I had a personal fitness goal  Sometimes you just need a little kick to get started

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Mass file renaming via drag amp drop   Ages ago I ve made a small VBScript that accepts a RegEx and replaces file names accordingly  You would simply drop a bunch of files or folders on it  I found that to be very useful throughout the years   gist github com 15824  Beware  the comments are in German

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A script that reads a config file in the current dir  logs into an FTP account  and uploads all files that have changed since the last time it was run  Really handy for clients who use shared hosting  and FTP is my only option for file access   http   lucasoman com code updater

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A bash script called up so that if I m in  a very deeply nested path somewhere and I want to go  up  N directories  I can type up N      bin bash LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P   For example    a very deeply nested path somewhere gt  up 4  a very gt     NB by gmatt   Working off the great work above  it can be extended to a back function by placing the following into your bashrc   function up      LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P export MPWD  P    function back      LIMIT  1 P  MPWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P   P      done cd  P export MPWD  P

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I have a batch file which runs every morning  which launches a browser with the tabs loaded to all the sites I want to check each day  Woot  Dilbert  Doonesbury  UserFriendly  seasonally  NY Mets scores and electoral-vote com  plus a few websites that need to be visited regularly to keep membership active

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On Windows XP  I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C    dir  s  b    gt  dirlist txt   This lists the full path of all files on the C drive  Then whenever I need to find a file  I can use findstr  This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path  For example   findstr   jpg  dirlist txt findstr  i  r  windows  system32  png   dirlist txt   This is a very fast solution to set up  and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection   If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern  first list all of the files you need to check  then search within them  For example  to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this   findstr    java   py  dirlist txt  gt  narrowlist txt findstr  i  r  f narrowlist txt  flip  image

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I wrote a file extraction tool to be used in Linux  that can extract about 20 different file formats and uses the file content  not the file name   This tool got quite popular  I have a regular stream of people who download it from my blog  Get it here    E - Extract Any Archive

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Running WinXP and I never seem to have time to kick off a defrag and wait for it to finish  So I wrote my own script to fire off XP s builtin defrag exe and scheduled it to run nitely  The results are saved to a log file in C  Temp for later review    echo off  GOTO  MAIN                                                                  Reason         This script runs the defrag utility       Suggestion        Schedule this script to run daily  via schtasks          Example           SCHTASKS  Create  SC DAILY  ST 03 00 00                     TR   C  path to DAILY DEFRAG BAT   TN  Daily Defrag of C Drive           Example           AT 03 00  every Su M T W Th F Sa C  path to DAILY DEFRAG BAT      Required OS         Windows XP or Windows Server 2003      Required files        DEFRAG EXE                                                                   MAIN        Output a listing of scheduled tasks    SCHTASKS  QUERY  V  gt  C  temp schtasks out                                                                        SITE SPECIFIC Program Parameters                                                                                        Drive to defrag         SET TARGET C           Log file         SET LOGFILE C  temp defrag log                                                                       No editable parameters below this line                                                                               SETLOCAL         Announce intentions    echo     echo Beginning defragmentation of disk  TARGET     echo ----------------------------------------------     echo     for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   date  t   do set NOW   a    for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   time  t   do set NOW  NOW    a    echo  Start time   NOW         Run the defrag utility    C  WINNT SYSTEM32 defrag exe  TARGET  -f -v  gt   LOGFILE      echo     for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   date  t   do set NOW   a    for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   time  t   do set NOW  NOW    a    echo    End time   NOW      echo     echo ----------------------------------------------    echo Defrag complete      echo     END

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I use a DOS program that errors out if it s past a certain date   I just looked at the batch file that it was using to start up and changed it so it would first change the date to 2000  then run the program   On the program s exit  it changed the date back to what it was before it was changed

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I wrote a file extraction tool to be used in Linux  that can extract about 20 different file formats and uses the file content  not the file name   This tool got quite popular  I have a regular stream of people who download it from my blog  Get it here    E - Extract Any Archive

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usr bin perl use strict  use utf8  use Encode  use File  Find  binmode STDOUT    utf8   sub orderly       my   x   y        a   b       if  my  z    x  lt   gt   y   return  z       x   length  a       y   length  b      my  z    x  lt   y    x    y      if  substr  a  0   z  eq substr  b  0   z             return  y  lt   gt   x            else           return  a cmp  b          my  conf   map        gt  0   split      acsxL   sub Stat   conf L    lstat   stat  my  dirs       while  defined       shift         if     eq  --    push  dirs   ARGV  last      elsif    -      s            for  split      1                if   exists  conf     or  conf       1 and  conf a  and  conf s                     print STDERR   0  -a   -c   -s   -x   -L   --      n                   exit 1                                    else  push  dirs        s       s for  dirs        SO has crappy syntax highlighting  dirs   qw    unless  dirs  my  spec    follow   gt   conf L   no chdir   gt  1   if   conf a          spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     elsif   conf s          spec wanted    sub           Stat              dirs 0      -f     -s     0           else        spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1            -d   and pop  a          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     if   conf x          spec preprocess    sub           my  dev    Stat  File  Find  dir  0           grep   dev     Stat   File  Find  dir      0                while   dirs        find   spec   dirs 0  eq             dirs 0                      dirs 0   if  conf c       shift  dirs            lt  1024    1   printf   s    -6 6sB    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    0                lt  1024    2   printf   s    -6 6sK    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    1                lt  1024    3   printf   s    -6 6sM    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    2                lt  1024    4   printf   s    -6 6sG    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    3                lt  1024    5   printf   s    -6 6sT    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    4                lt  1024    6   printf   s    -6 6sP    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    5                lt  1024    7   printf   s    -6 6sE    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    6                lt  1024    8   printf   s    -6 6sZ    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    7                             printf   s    -6 6sY    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    8          for grep          gt  0  sort orderly keys       I save it in   bin dush  it acts as a sort of du -h du   sort -n hybrid  sorts and gives human-readable sizes all at once   Very useful for finding what s taking up disk space   In a similar vein      usr bin perl  t   1   p   map       gt    t    1024   qw K M G T P E Z Y    t   4707319808  if   ARGV        if        shift       - dvd i    t   4707319808      elsif    - cd  w    i    t   737280000      elsif    - cd i    t   681984000      elsif    -    d      kmgtpezy   i    t    1     p   U 2      1       elsif    -    d         t    1      else  unshift  ARGV          q   r   s     0    ENV COLUMNS     80  - 13   t   while   lt  gt         chomp  stat      unless  -e              print STDERR     does not exist n           next            if    s    -s     gt   t             s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n               sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s          printf  ----------- d  s n      q   r   -  x  r           s   -s              printf   8s  s n           sprintf   3 3f      s   100    t              4     r    s        1           s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n       sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s    I save this as   bin fit   When I m archiving a bunch of files  I run ls   fit or ls   fit -cdrw to help determine if it ll fit on a DVD CD CDRW  and where to split them if they don t

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I use this as an autoloaded function  I can just type  mycd  and a list of directories appears which I frequently cd to  If I happen to know then number I can just say something like  mycd 2   To add a directory to the list you just type  mycd  tmp foo somedirectory    function mycd    MYCD  tmp mycd txt touch   MYCD   typeset -i x typeset -i ITEM NO typeset -i i x 0  if    -n    1       then    if    -d    1       then       print    1    gt  gt    MYCD        sort -u   MYCD   gt    MYCD  tmp       mv   MYCD  tmp   MYCD        FOLDER   1     else       i   1        FOLDER   sed -n    i p    MYCD      fi fi  if    -z    1       then    print       cat   MYCD    while read f  do       x   expr   x    1        print    x     f      done    print   nSelect       read ITEM NO    FOLDER   sed -n    ITEM NO p    MYCD   fi  if    -d    FOLDER       then    cd   FOLDER  fi

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Called assignIisSite ToAppPool js  Really useful when you want to make sure that some resources are properly mapped       SetAppPool  W3SVC 1059997624 Root    MyAppPool       function SetAppPool webId  appPoolName    var providerObj GetObject  winmgmts  root MicrosoftIISv2    var vdirObj providerObj get  IIsWebVirtualDirSetting      webId         vdirObj AppPoolId appPoolName  vdirObj Put

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A small application that left click  or double-click  every  X  ms for  Y  amount of time  No more need for that drinking bird to work at the nuclear power plant

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Various Shortcuts to  net start  and  net stop  commands so I can start and stop services without having to go into the Services MMC

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I wrote a python program to calculate my apartment s shared spending and output a neat little grid  with roommate as the columns and expense category as the row  along with how much money each roommate owed for rent  after adjusting for his contribution toward shared expenses   We d been sharing this way for a while  but just adding up raw totals at the end of the month   I needed more granular control   With a maximum of eight keystrokes per line-item  this is way better than excel  I was sort of on a desperate quest to stop the monthly trend of one roommate spending 25  of our budget on beverages

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I like to store my photos in a directory based on the date the picture was taken  Therefore I wrote a program that would scan a memory card for pictures  create any folders on my hard disk that it needed to based on the dates of the pictures  then copy them in

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This  from a posting in my blog a few months ago  has gone from being an idea that I thought was cool to one of the best little hacks I ve coughed up in recent memory   I quote it in full here                       I spend a lot of time in bash   For the uninitiated  bash is a system that you ll find on most unix machines and  thankfully  some windows and every Mac out there   At first blush  it s no more than a command-line interface  and therefore off the radar of most users who see such things as an anachronism they d rather forget   I do nearly everything in bash   I READ MY EMAIL FROM A COMMAND LINE  which is why I eschew marked-up email   I navigate directories  edit files  engage in my daily source code checkout and delivery  search for files  search inside files  reboot my machine  and even occasionally browse web pages from the command line  bash is the heart and soul of my digital existence   The trouble is that I tend to have about 6 bash windows open at a time   At work today  I had one running a web server  another fiddling with my database  a third  fourth  and fifth editing different files  while a sixth was grinding away through my machine trying to record the names of every file on the system  Why   Because it s handy to be able to search through such an archive if you want to know where to find an object by filename   When you do this  you end up with lots of windows in your control bar named simply   bash    This is fine if you only have one of them  but its agony when you have 6 or more     and two dozen other things going on   I have three monitors under the simultaneous command of one keyboard mouse pair and I still feel the need for more   Each of those windows has several bash terminals open   So I ve plunked this together   First  place these lines in your  bash profile     export PROMPT COMMAND  export TRIM    bin trim pl     export PS1     e 0   TRIM a    TRIM gt      trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   I went through and wrote dozens of paragraphs on how this all works and exactly why it is set up the way it is  but you re not really interested   Trust me   There is an entire chapter of a book in why I did  CMD      echo     on that third line   Many people  including bluehost  where my other domain is hosted  are still using and old version of bash with major bugs in how it handles traps  so we re stuck with this   You can remove the CMD and replace it with  BASH COMMAND if you are current on your bash version and feel like doing the research   Anyway  the first script I use is here   It creates a nice prompt that contains your machine name and directory  chopped down to a reasonable length                                      trim pl                 usr bin perl     It seems that my cygwin box doesn t have HOSTNAME available in the     environment - at least not to scripts - so I m getting it elsewhere    open  IN    usr bin hostname        hostname    lt IN gt     close  IN      hostname        A-Za-z0-9-         host short    1      preamble         if  length  ENV  PWD    gt 37       ENV  PWD          1 37         path short    1     print   host short   preamble path short                                                             There s a warning at the top of this blog post that you should read now before you start asking stupid questions like   Why didn t you just use the HOSTNAME environment variable via  ENV    Simple   Because that doesn t work for all the systems I tried it on     Now for the really cool bit   Remember line 3 of the  bash profile addition     trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   It s dumping the trim pl script output in the same container as before  printing to both the command prompt and the window title  but this time it s adding the command that you just typed   This is why you don t want to be doing all of this in your  bashrc  any script you run  on my machine  man is one of them  will trigger this thing on every line   man s output gets seriously garbled by what we re doing here   We re not exactly playing nice with the terminal   To grab the command you just typed  we take the bash s history and dice it up a bit                                      hist pl                usr bin perl  while   lt STDIN gt              line         chomp  line   line        27        print  1                                                           So now  I have a bazillion windows going and they say things like     castro   home ronb blog   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot script server   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot mysql -u ron -p   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot find    gt   C ronb system map   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot vi app views cart html erb   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 protect   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 sync -f   Ron-D630   C perforce depot    From the happy little bar at the bottom of the screen  I can now tell which is which at a moment s glance   And because we ve set PS1  as soon as a command finishes executing  the command name is replaced by just the output of trim pl again   UPDATE  same day     This stuff  the  bash profile entries  laid all kinds of hell on me when I   tried it in my  bashrc   Your  bashrc is executed by non-interactive scripts   whenever you invoke bash as a language   I hit this when I was trying to use   man   All sorts of garbage  the complete text of my  bashrc  plus escape   charecters  showed up at the top of the man page   I would suggest testing   this gem with a quick  man man  invocation at the command line once you get   it all together   I guess it s time for me to pull the custom garbage out of my  bashrc and put   it where it belongs     Incedentally  I found myself typing  man trap  at one point in this process

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Wrote a little bash script that knew just enough about fonts to search through about 10k fonts and look for certain key words  in spite of their useless filenames but not return very many false positives   Took a while to run  about a minute on the dinky iMac  but it has saved me probably 50 hrs over the course of the last few years

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Mass file renaming via drag amp drop   Ages ago I ve made a small VBScript that accepts a RegEx and replaces file names accordingly  You would simply drop a bunch of files or folders on it  I found that to be very useful throughout the years   gist github com 15824  Beware  the comments are in German

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MySQL backup  I made a Windows batch script that would create incremental backups of MySQL databases  create a fresh dump every day and back them up every 10 minutes on a remote server  It saved my ass countless times  especially in the countless situations where a client would call  yelling their head off that a record just  disappeared  from the database  I went  no problem  let s see what happened  because I also wrote a binary search script that would look for the last moment when a record was present in the database  From there it would be pretty easy to understand who  stole  it and why  You wouldn t imagine how useful these have been and I ve been using them for almost 5 years  I wouldn t switch to anything else simply because they ve been roughly tested and they re custom made  meaning they do exactly what I need and nothing more but I ve tweaked them so much that it would be a snap to add extra functionalities  So  my  masterpiece  is a MySQL incremental backup   remote backup   logs search system for Windows  I also wrote a version for Linux but I ve lost it somewhere  probably because it was only about 15 lines   a cron job instead of Windows  about 1 200 lines   two scheduled tasks

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A perl script that scrapes my local Craigslist  by selected categories  in to a SQL DB which I can then query against    V2 of this updates the DB with a timer and alerts me if I have a match on any of the queries  basically providing me with a background agent for CL

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I ve written a small shell script  tapt  for Debian based system  esp  Ubuntu  What it basically does is to post all your  apt-get  activities to your twitter account  It helps me to keep the track of what and when I ve installed remove programs in my Ubuntu system  I created a new Twitter account just for this and kept it private  Really useful  More information here  http   www quicktweaks com tapt

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I use a DOS program that errors out if it s past a certain date   I just looked at the batch file that it was using to start up and changed it so it would first change the date to 2000  then run the program   On the program s exit  it changed the date back to what it was before it was changed

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Not every day  but I did use XSLT script to create my wedding invitations  a Pages file for the inserts to the invite cards  and an HTML file for the address labels

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I suppose I should include my own answer to this  for completion s sake    I wrote a simple script that takes in the expenses of two people living together  and calculates which person owes the other money at the end of the month so that each person spent equally  I plan to extend it to store the categories of each expense and store them in a database  Sure  I could just use existing software   but where s the fun in that   Not very complex  sure  but as far as non-work related scripts that I use a lot at home  this one is the current leader

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Called assignIisSite ToAppPool js  Really useful when you want to make sure that some resources are properly mapped       SetAppPool  W3SVC 1059997624 Root    MyAppPool       function SetAppPool webId  appPoolName    var providerObj GetObject  winmgmts  root MicrosoftIISv2    var vdirObj providerObj get  IIsWebVirtualDirSetting      webId         vdirObj AppPoolId appPoolName  vdirObj Put

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I wrote a simple VB app that tracked which game numbers of Freecell I had played and successfully completed  and always launched it with a different seed       starting from 1      Max game number is 65k  Rather sadly after more than 5 years I am still in only the hundreds  But at least I know I ve never played the same hand twice      Postscript - it s the only VB app I ve ever written  I ran screaming back to C

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Work Home ps1 and Work Work ps1    modify the hosts file  to go through LAN or WAN addresses

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I had a version control script that would take a directory as an argument  and recursively copy all files to    dirname DATE TIME   Obviously it was a crappy way to do things  but it was handy before installing a real version control package

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I suppose this depends on how you define useful  but my favorite little script is a variant on the  nix fortune program  See below  and you ll get the idea of what it does   telemachus     haiku      January-- in other provinces     plums blooming      Issa   It doesn t really get anything done  but a nice haiku goes a long way   I like how the colorizer decided to interpret the poem    Edit  If I really have to be useful  I d say a script that allows a user to enter a US zipcode and get current weather and 0-3 days of forecast from Google

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An alert box  on a random timer  guaranteed to pop-up at least once an hour to remind me to do some pushups   I used it when I was in the military   I also wrote architecture rules  http   architecturerules org  for me and anyone else

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I wrote a simple VB app that tracked which game numbers of Freecell I had played and successfully completed  and always launched it with a different seed       starting from 1      Max game number is 65k  Rather sadly after more than 5 years I am still in only the hundreds  But at least I know I ve never played the same hand twice      Postscript - it s the only VB app I ve ever written  I ran screaming back to C

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Best real-life script   Me   Enters room    Boss  I want a raise      Boss    Offers chair from behind desk   A raise   Please  take my job    Then again  that may be the worst script

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I have a batch file which establishes a VPN connection and then enters an infinite loop  pinging a machine on the other side of the connection every five minutes so that the VPN server doesn t drop the connection due to inactivity if I don t generate any traffic over that connection for a while

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MySQL backup  I made a Windows batch script that would create incremental backups of MySQL databases  create a fresh dump every day and back them up every 10 minutes on a remote server  It saved my ass countless times  especially in the countless situations where a client would call  yelling their head off that a record just  disappeared  from the database  I went  no problem  let s see what happened  because I also wrote a binary search script that would look for the last moment when a record was present in the database  From there it would be pretty easy to understand who  stole  it and why  You wouldn t imagine how useful these have been and I ve been using them for almost 5 years  I wouldn t switch to anything else simply because they ve been roughly tested and they re custom made  meaning they do exactly what I need and nothing more but I ve tweaked them so much that it would be a snap to add extra functionalities  So  my  masterpiece  is a MySQL incremental backup   remote backup   logs search system for Windows  I also wrote a version for Linux but I ve lost it somewhere  probably because it was only about 15 lines   a cron job instead of Windows  about 1 200 lines   two scheduled tasks

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VBS script to create a YYYY YYYY-MM YYYY-MM-DD file structure in my photos folder and move photos from my camera to the appropriate folder

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A script that runs hourly to retrain my spam filters based two IMAP folder where span and ham are put      bin sh FNDIR  train-as-spam  FPDIR  train-as-ham   for dir in  home    maildir do     cd    dir       USER  stat -c  U         SRCDIR    dir     FNDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class spam --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi      SRCDIR    dir     FPDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class innocent --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi  done

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I m a private pilot   I wrote a couple of scripts that obtain weather information for local airports from aviationweather gov   They were useful for a quick answer to the question  Is today a good day to fly

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I often use a MS Word macro that takes a source-code file  formats it in two columns of monospaced type on a landscape page  numbers the lines  and adds company header and footer info such as filename  print date  page number  and confidentiality statement   Printing both sides of the page uses about 1 4 the paper as the equivalent lpr command    Does anyone use lpr anymore

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backup sh  that tars up the contents of a directory and sends it to my gmail account

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backup sh  that tars up the contents of a directory and sends it to my gmail account

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A small application that left click  or double-click  every  X  ms for  Y  amount of time  No more need for that drinking bird to work at the nuclear power plant

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My o key fell off on my laptop  so I wrote a program that replaces two 0 keystrokes within 200 MS of each other as an o  two 0 keystrokes within 700 MS of each other as a 0 and ignore the rest  so I could use my laptop before I get around to replacing the keyboard   Wow  I didn t know this would be so popular  p  As for how - Microsoft exposes a nice little API feature called Hooks   Using that hook  I was able to write a  filter  that did what I needed it to do  hint  if you return 1 with your callback windows will not process the keystroke    The reason I know about this actually is not because I was writing a keylogger - but because I wrote a program smiler to Synergy a while ago   And yes  I did write another program that swapped alpha-numeric keys with a random alpha-numeric key and yes  it was really funny  D

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An alert box  on a random timer  guaranteed to pop-up at least once an hour to remind me to do some pushups   I used it when I was in the military   I also wrote architecture rules  http   architecturerules org  for me and anyone else

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I wrote some lines of code to automatically tweak all things powertop suggests when I unplug my laptop and undo that if I plug the laptop back in  Maximum power  maximum efficiency  maximum convenience

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A shell script to perform rotating backups using rsync   It also supports executing arbitrary child programs to support other pre-backup activities  downloading delicious bookmarks  for example    http   gist github com 6806

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A script to allow easy greping of ps results      usr bin php -f  lt  php  process    argv 1   echo shell exec  ps -ef   grep  process   grep -v grep    exit 0

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For those of us who don t remember where we are on unix  or which SID we are using   Pop this in your  profile    lt br gt function CD  lt br gt    lt br gt    unalias cd  lt br gt    command cd       amp  amp  PS1     ORACLE SID    hostname   PWD gt     lt br gt    alias cd CD  lt br gt    lt br gt  alias cd CD

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backup sh  that tars up the contents of a directory and sends it to my gmail account

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I wrote some lines of code to automatically tweak all things powertop suggests when I unplug my laptop and undo that if I plug the laptop back in  Maximum power  maximum efficiency  maximum convenience

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I m a private pilot   I wrote a couple of scripts that obtain weather information for local airports from aviationweather gov   They were useful for a quick answer to the question  Is today a good day to fly

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I wrote a cron job to grab the ip address of my dads router and ftp it to a secure location so when he needed help I could remote desktop in and fix his comp

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I use procmail to sort my incoming email to different folders  Because I have trouble remembering the procmailrc syntax  I use m4 as a preprocessor  Here s how my procmailrc begins  this isn t the script yet    divert -1  changequote  lt  lt    gt  gt   define mailinglistrule    lt  lt  0     2 Lists  1  gt  gt   define listdt   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  Delivered-To    2  gt  gt   define listid   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  List-Id    lt  2 gt   gt  gt   divert  Generated from  procmailrc m4 -- DO NOT EDIT   This defines two macros for mailing lists  so e g  listdt foo  foo example com  expands to   0     Delivered-To   foo example com Lists foo   meaning that emails with a Delivered-To header containing foo example com should be put in the Lists foo folder  It also arranges the processed file to begin with a comment that warns me not to edit that file directly   Now  frankly  m4 scares me  what if I accidentally redefine a macro and procmail starts discarding all my email  or something like that  That s why I have a script  which I call update-procmailrc  that shows me in diff format how my procmailrc is going to change  If the change is just a few lines and looks roughly like what I intended  I can happily approve it  but if there are huge changes to the file  I know to look at my edits more carefully       bin sh  PROCMAILRC  procmailrc TMPNAM  procmailrc tmp    cd  HOME umask 077 trap  rm -f  TMPNAM  0  m4  lt   procmailrc m4  gt   TMPNAM diff -u  PROCMAILRC  TMPNAM  echo -n  Is this acceptable   y N    read accept  if   -z   accept     then     accept n fi  if    accept    y  -o  accept    Y     then     mv -f  TMPNAM  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        chmod 400  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        echo  Created new  PROCMAILRC      if        -ne 0    then         echo      FAILED creating  PROCMAILRC      fi else     echo  Didn t update  PROCMAILRC  fi   The script hasn t yet prevented any email disasters  but it has made me less anxious about changing my procmailrc

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I m a private pilot   I wrote a couple of scripts that obtain weather information for local airports from aviationweather gov   They were useful for a quick answer to the question  Is today a good day to fly

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I had a version control script that would take a directory as an argument  and recursively copy all files to    dirname DATE TIME   Obviously it was a crappy way to do things  but it was handy before installing a real version control package

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I use a DOS program that errors out if it s past a certain date   I just looked at the batch file that it was using to start up and changed it so it would first change the date to 2000  then run the program   On the program s exit  it changed the date back to what it was before it was changed

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A small task-bar program that extracted every error-code constant out of a third-party JavaDoc and let me lookup the constant-name for a given error code  Plus  add in any conversions from HEX to decimal  etc   This comes up a lot when working in the debugger--you get back the error code  but then tracking back the code to text is a huge pain  It s even more common when working with software that wraps native methods  OS calls  or COM    often times  the constants are copied straight out of an error header file with no additional context  repeated values  and no enumerations

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A simply Python script that converts line endings from Unix to Windows that I stuck in my system32 directory  It s been lost to the ages for a few months  now  but basically it d convert a list of known text-based file types to Windows line endings  and you could specify which files to convert  or all files  for a wildcard list

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I use this as an autoloaded function  I can just type  mycd  and a list of directories appears which I frequently cd to  If I happen to know then number I can just say something like  mycd 2   To add a directory to the list you just type  mycd  tmp foo somedirectory    function mycd    MYCD  tmp mycd txt touch   MYCD   typeset -i x typeset -i ITEM NO typeset -i i x 0  if    -n    1       then    if    -d    1       then       print    1    gt  gt    MYCD        sort -u   MYCD   gt    MYCD  tmp       mv   MYCD  tmp   MYCD        FOLDER   1     else       i   1        FOLDER   sed -n    i p    MYCD      fi fi  if    -z    1       then    print       cat   MYCD    while read f  do       x   expr   x    1        print    x     f      done    print   nSelect       read ITEM NO    FOLDER   sed -n    ITEM NO p    MYCD   fi  if    -d    FOLDER       then    cd   FOLDER  fi

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alias snoot  find     -path     svn   -print0   xargs -0 egrep

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A shell script to perform rotating backups using rsync   It also supports executing arbitrary child programs to support other pre-backup activities  downloading delicious bookmarks  for example    http   gist github com 6806

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I don t have the code any more  but possibly the most useful script I wrote was  believe it or not  in VBA   I had an annoying colleague who had such a short fuse that I referred to him as Cherry Bomb   He would often get mad when customers would call and then stand up and start ranting at me over the cubicle wall  killing my productivity and morale   I always had Microsoft Excel open   When he would do this  I would alt-tab to Excel and there  on the toolbar  was a new icon with an image of a cherry bomb   I would discreetly click that     and nothing would happen   However  shortly after that I would get a phone call and would say something like  yeah  yeah  that sounds bad   I had better take a look    And then I would get up  apologize to the Cherry Bomb and walk away   What happened is that we used NetWare and it had a primitive messaging system built in   When I clicked the button  a small VBA script would send out a NetWare message to my friends  telling them that the Cherry Bomb was at it again and would they please call me   He never figured it out

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bin bash   check to see if site is up     if it is  don t worry     if it s down  restart apache after get a process listing     v 1 Warren M Myers - initial stab       31 Aug 06    ERRCOD  7  WHEN  date   d b y  REPT    psaux  WHEN txt  STARS                         curl -I http   www shodor org  gt   var tmp curlret txt  if            ERRCOD     then       return was unable to connect to host  save ps -aux  mail report     ps -aux  gt   REPT     echo  STARS     echo  curl return results      echo     cat curlret txt     echo     echo  STARS     echo  ps -aux results      cat  REPT     echo     echo  STARS     echo  restarting apache       etc init d apache2 restart     echo  apache restarted      echo     echo  ps -aux results saved in  REPT  fi  rm -f  var tmp curlret txt

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A bash script called up so that if I m in  a very deeply nested path somewhere and I want to go  up  N directories  I can type up N      bin bash LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P   For example    a very deeply nested path somewhere gt  up 4  a very gt     NB by gmatt   Working off the great work above  it can be extended to a back function by placing the following into your bashrc   function up      LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P export MPWD  P    function back      LIMIT  1 P  MPWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P   P      done cd  P export MPWD  P

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I wrote a cron job to grab the ip address of my dads router and ftp it to a secure location so when he needed help I could remote desktop in and fix his comp

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I got a script which extracts id3 tags encodes the songs newly in a certain format  and then adds them according to the tags to my music library   300 lines of python  Mostly because lame isn t able to deal with tags in a nice fashion

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Various Shortcuts to  net start  and  net stop  commands so I can start and stop services without having to go into the Services MMC

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Sometimes I forget what are the most recent files I just created in a directory  but a ls command will just show every file in the directory  I just want a few most recent files so I put this in my  cshrc   ls -l -t   awk  NR lt 15 print  0      Actually it is in a file called lt and in the  cshrc it is set with  alias lt    lt    So now lt will show me only a few files

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A perl script that scrapes my local Craigslist  by selected categories  in to a SQL DB which I can then query against    V2 of this updates the DB with a timer and alerts me if I have a match on any of the queries  basically providing me with a background agent for CL

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I have a Python script that automatically runs when I plug my digital camera in.

It copies all of the pictures off the card on the camera, backs them up, and then uploads them to Flickr.

The upload-to-Flickr piece comes from uploadr.py (which I can't take credit for).

Here's the Python code for unloading the camera. It recurses through SRCDIR and names each image with the date & time before copying the images to DESTDIR.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import string
import time
import shutil

###################################################
__SRCDIR__ = "/mnt/camera"
__DESTDIR__ = "/home/pictures/recent"
###################################################
def cbwalk(arg, dirname, names):
    sdatetime = time.strftime("%y%m%d%H%M")
    for name in names:
        if string.lower(name[-3:]) in ("jpg", "mov"):
            srcfile = "%s/%s" % (dirname, name)
            destfile = "%s/%s_%s" % (__DESTDIR__, sdatetime, name)
                    print destfile
            shutil.copyfile( srcfile, destfile)
###################################################
if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.path.walk(__SRCDIR__, cbwalk, None)

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I ve written a small shell script  tapt  for Debian based system  esp  Ubuntu  What it basically does is to post all your  apt-get  activities to your twitter account  It helps me to keep the track of what and when I ve installed remove programs in my Ubuntu system  I created a new Twitter account just for this and kept it private  Really useful  More information here  http   www quicktweaks com tapt

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I wrote a Python script that would go to all the web comics I read  and download any new comics  I just run that once a day  and there is no need to visit each site individually  just visit the  Comics  Folder

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copy con c bat c  cd  cls  Z

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A small application that left click  or double-click  every  X  ms for  Y  amount of time  No more need for that drinking bird to work at the nuclear power plant

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Anime CRC32 checksum      usr bin python                                                                                                                                                                                    import sys  re  zlib  c null     00 00m  c red     31 01m  c green     32 01m   def crc checksum filename       filedata   open filename   rb   read       sum   zlib crc32 filedata      if sum  lt  0          sum  amp   16  8-1     return    8X    sum   for file in sys argv 1        sum   crc checksum file      try          dest sum   re split           file  -2          if sum    dest sum              c in   c green         else              c in   c red         sfile   file split dest sum          print   s s s    s s s s s     c in  sum  c null  sfile 0   c in  dest sum  c null  sfile 1       except IndexError          print   s    s    sum  file

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My  cmd backup script  It runs on my server every night  and names the backup files according the week day  A full week of backups has saved me  and my family  many times       Backup args        V Verify   yes no        R Restrict access to owner   yes no        RS Removable storage   yes no        HC Hardware compression  on off        M Backup type  normal copy differential incremental daily        L Log file type  f s n        D  Description        J  Job-name        F  File-name   SETLOCAL     ensure that network drives are mounted CALL C  bat configs MapShares-home cmd echo on  set today  DATE  0 3  if  today   Mon set yesterday 0Sunday if  today   Tue set yesterday 1Monday if  today   Wed set yesterday 2Tuesday if  today   Thu set yesterday 3Wednesday if  today   Fri set yesterday 4Thursday if  today   Sat set yesterday 5Friday if  today   Sun set yesterday 6Saturday  set configsDir   dp0 set storePath C  mybackups      eg  Monday C files  set title  yesterday  backup set   echo  DATE   TIME   title      storePath   yesterday  backup log   CALL BackupConfigs bat     Create new BKF file call C  WINDOWS system32 ntbackup exe backup          configsDir  daily bks         V yes  R no  RS no  HC off  M normal  L s        D   title          J   title  job         F   storePath   yesterday  bkf             storePath   yesterday  backup log   echo  DATE   TIME  Completed      storePath   yesterday  backup log   copy   storePath   yesterday  bkf   V  Backups NEPTUNE   CALL C  bat clean-temps bat  defrag -v C      storePath   yesterday  defrag log      display backup directories start  D C  bat Backups   checkbkf bat  ENDLOCAL    pause

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I have a batch file which establishes a VPN connection and then enters an infinite loop  pinging a machine on the other side of the connection every five minutes so that the VPN server doesn t drop the connection due to inactivity if I don t generate any traffic over that connection for a while

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A Greasemonkey script to add a  press that button a lot  control box to an online game

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Various Shortcuts to  net start  and  net stop  commands so I can start and stop services without having to go into the Services MMC

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I like how git figures out when to use less  subversion doesn t have that feature so I want to easily get colored output in a pager  the cgrep alias lets me choose quickly  without it there are times I get raw color output   I also  when grepping through code  don t like to see certain results  like  svn ctags binary files  grep -R sourcecodetext sourcedir   nosvn   Below is what I have in my config files  cat  bash profile  alias nosvn  grep -v     svn  tags  cscope  Binary    alias less  less -R  alias diff  colordiff -u  alias cgrep  grep --color always   export GREP OPTIONS  --color auto    cat bin gitdiffwrapper     bin bash  old file  1 tmp file  2 old hex  3 old mode  4 new file  5 new mode  6  colordiff -u  old file  tmp file   cat  gitconfig    diff      external    HOME bin gitdiffwrapper   cat  subversion config    grep  diff-cmd  diff-cmd    usr bin colordiff

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As a scheduled task  to copy any modified new files from entire drive d  to backup drive g   and to log the files copied   It helps me keep track of what I did when  as well   justdate is a small program to prints the date and time to the screen  g   cd  drive d  d   cd    type g  backup d log    g  logs backup d log  echo                                               g  backup d log  d  mu bmutil justdate    g  backup d log  xcopy  s  d  y  c   g  drive d    g  backup d log

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A shell script to perform rotating backups using rsync   It also supports executing arbitrary child programs to support other pre-backup activities  downloading delicious bookmarks  for example    http   gist github com 6806

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Called assignIisSite ToAppPool js  Really useful when you want to make sure that some resources are properly mapped       SetAppPool  W3SVC 1059997624 Root    MyAppPool       function SetAppPool webId  appPoolName    var providerObj GetObject  winmgmts  root MicrosoftIISv2    var vdirObj providerObj get  IIsWebVirtualDirSetting      webId         vdirObj AppPoolId appPoolName  vdirObj Put

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I have a Python script that automatically runs when I plug my digital camera in.

It copies all of the pictures off the card on the camera, backs them up, and then uploads them to Flickr.

The upload-to-Flickr piece comes from uploadr.py (which I can't take credit for).

Here's the Python code for unloading the camera. It recurses through SRCDIR and names each image with the date & time before copying the images to DESTDIR.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import string
import time
import shutil

###################################################
__SRCDIR__ = "/mnt/camera"
__DESTDIR__ = "/home/pictures/recent"
###################################################
def cbwalk(arg, dirname, names):
    sdatetime = time.strftime("%y%m%d%H%M")
    for name in names:
        if string.lower(name[-3:]) in ("jpg", "mov"):
            srcfile = "%s/%s" % (dirname, name)
            destfile = "%s/%s_%s" % (__DESTDIR__, sdatetime, name)
                    print destfile
            shutil.copyfile( srcfile, destfile)
###################################################
if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.path.walk(__SRCDIR__, cbwalk, None)

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Sometimes I forget what are the most recent files I just created in a directory  but a ls command will just show every file in the directory  I just want a few most recent files so I put this in my  cshrc   ls -l -t   awk  NR lt 15 print  0      Actually it is in a file called lt and in the  cshrc it is set with  alias lt    lt    So now lt will show me only a few files

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A similar backup sh for each project  that tars and gzips just the source  moves it into a snapshot directory and labels it with timestamp  project-mmddyy-hhmmss   Useful for coding between commits

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A little script that monitors some popular websites for ads that match my skills and email me an email

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My  cmd backup script  It runs on my server every night  and names the backup files according the week day  A full week of backups has saved me  and my family  many times       Backup args        V Verify   yes no        R Restrict access to owner   yes no        RS Removable storage   yes no        HC Hardware compression  on off        M Backup type  normal copy differential incremental daily        L Log file type  f s n        D  Description        J  Job-name        F  File-name   SETLOCAL     ensure that network drives are mounted CALL C  bat configs MapShares-home cmd echo on  set today  DATE  0 3  if  today   Mon set yesterday 0Sunday if  today   Tue set yesterday 1Monday if  today   Wed set yesterday 2Tuesday if  today   Thu set yesterday 3Wednesday if  today   Fri set yesterday 4Thursday if  today   Sat set yesterday 5Friday if  today   Sun set yesterday 6Saturday  set configsDir   dp0 set storePath C  mybackups      eg  Monday C files  set title  yesterday  backup set   echo  DATE   TIME   title      storePath   yesterday  backup log   CALL BackupConfigs bat     Create new BKF file call C  WINDOWS system32 ntbackup exe backup          configsDir  daily bks         V yes  R no  RS no  HC off  M normal  L s        D   title          J   title  job         F   storePath   yesterday  bkf             storePath   yesterday  backup log   echo  DATE   TIME  Completed      storePath   yesterday  backup log   copy   storePath   yesterday  bkf   V  Backups NEPTUNE   CALL C  bat clean-temps bat  defrag -v C      storePath   yesterday  defrag log      display backup directories start  D C  bat Backups   checkbkf bat  ENDLOCAL    pause

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I use this as an autoloaded function  I can just type  mycd  and a list of directories appears which I frequently cd to  If I happen to know then number I can just say something like  mycd 2   To add a directory to the list you just type  mycd  tmp foo somedirectory    function mycd    MYCD  tmp mycd txt touch   MYCD   typeset -i x typeset -i ITEM NO typeset -i i x 0  if    -n    1       then    if    -d    1       then       print    1    gt  gt    MYCD        sort -u   MYCD   gt    MYCD  tmp       mv   MYCD  tmp   MYCD        FOLDER   1     else       i   1        FOLDER   sed -n    i p    MYCD      fi fi  if    -z    1       then    print       cat   MYCD    while read f  do       x   expr   x    1        print    x     f      done    print   nSelect       read ITEM NO    FOLDER   sed -n    ITEM NO p    MYCD   fi  if    -d    FOLDER       then    cd   FOLDER  fi

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Best real-life script   Me   Enters room    Boss  I want a raise      Boss    Offers chair from behind desk   A raise   Please  take my job    Then again  that may be the worst script

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I used to work at a technology summer camp  and we had to compose these write-ups for each of the kids in the group at the end of the week  which they would then receive and take home as a keepsake   Usually  these consisted of a bunch of generic sentences  and one to two personalized sentences   I wrote a python script which constructed one of these write-ups out of a bank of canned sentences  and allowed the user to add a couple of personalized sentences in the middle   This saved a huge amount of time for me and other counselors I let in on the secret   Even though so much of it was automated  our write-ups still looked better than many of the  honest  ones  because we could put more time into the personalized parts

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I wrote a simple VB app that tracked which game numbers of Freecell I had played and successfully completed  and always launched it with a different seed       starting from 1      Max game number is 65k  Rather sadly after more than 5 years I am still in only the hundreds  But at least I know I ve never played the same hand twice      Postscript - it s the only VB app I ve ever written  I ran screaming back to C

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Work Home ps1 and Work Work ps1    modify the hosts file  to go through LAN or WAN addresses

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I have a batch file which establishes a VPN connection and then enters an infinite loop  pinging a machine on the other side of the connection every five minutes so that the VPN server doesn t drop the connection due to inactivity if I don t generate any traffic over that connection for a while

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A Rakefile in my downloads directory containing tasks that copy files from said directory to their respective media archives on external drives  Given my internet speed and storage capacity  it would take me hours out of every week to just copy across and re-name appropriately every piece of media that is downloaded  completely legally  I might add  by hellanzb   Another very useful task in the same file logs into and scrapes IMDB for episode lists   discographies of all the media I have  and then checks NewzBin for reports that would fill any holes I have   Combined  this means I have to do absolutely nothing  and in exchange  I wake up every morning with more media than I could possibly consume in that day sitting on my external hard drives   Did I mention that this is all entirely above-board and legal  d-   I ll probably merge this all into a sort of command-line media manager player  farming things out to mplayer   and publish it on GitHub when I have the time

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I wrote a simple Ruby script to help my wife and I when we were considering names for our first child  It generated all name combinations and checked the initials against a blacklist of initials I wanted to avoid  excluding any that didn t match my criteria  It felt like an appropriate thing for a nerdy dad to do and actually proved to be quite worthwhile and useful   Other than that I ve written a couple of Python scripts that serve as IRC bots which I use every day  One saves URLs  via regular expression matching  to delicious  Another serves as a simple IRC Twitter interface  allowing me to check my feed and post updates

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A Quick and Dirty Python script that looked up the DNS for google com every 5 seconds and beeped once if it succeeded and twice if it failed    I wrote this during a time when I had to live with a highly flaky home network  It allowed me to instantly know the state of the network even while I was head first under the desk across the room with both hands full of network cable and a flashlight in my mouth

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My o key fell off on my laptop  so I wrote a program that replaces two 0 keystrokes within 200 MS of each other as an o  two 0 keystrokes within 700 MS of each other as a 0 and ignore the rest  so I could use my laptop before I get around to replacing the keyboard   Wow  I didn t know this would be so popular  p  As for how - Microsoft exposes a nice little API feature called Hooks   Using that hook  I was able to write a  filter  that did what I needed it to do  hint  if you return 1 with your callback windows will not process the keystroke    The reason I know about this actually is not because I was writing a keylogger - but because I wrote a program smiler to Synergy a while ago   And yes  I did write another program that swapped alpha-numeric keys with a random alpha-numeric key and yes  it was really funny  D

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I use procmail to sort my incoming email to different folders  Because I have trouble remembering the procmailrc syntax  I use m4 as a preprocessor  Here s how my procmailrc begins  this isn t the script yet    divert -1  changequote  lt  lt    gt  gt   define mailinglistrule    lt  lt  0     2 Lists  1  gt  gt   define listdt   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  Delivered-To    2  gt  gt   define listid   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  List-Id    lt  2 gt   gt  gt   divert  Generated from  procmailrc m4 -- DO NOT EDIT   This defines two macros for mailing lists  so e g  listdt foo  foo example com  expands to   0     Delivered-To   foo example com Lists foo   meaning that emails with a Delivered-To header containing foo example com should be put in the Lists foo folder  It also arranges the processed file to begin with a comment that warns me not to edit that file directly   Now  frankly  m4 scares me  what if I accidentally redefine a macro and procmail starts discarding all my email  or something like that  That s why I have a script  which I call update-procmailrc  that shows me in diff format how my procmailrc is going to change  If the change is just a few lines and looks roughly like what I intended  I can happily approve it  but if there are huge changes to the file  I know to look at my edits more carefully       bin sh  PROCMAILRC  procmailrc TMPNAM  procmailrc tmp    cd  HOME umask 077 trap  rm -f  TMPNAM  0  m4  lt   procmailrc m4  gt   TMPNAM diff -u  PROCMAILRC  TMPNAM  echo -n  Is this acceptable   y N    read accept  if   -z   accept     then     accept n fi  if    accept    y  -o  accept    Y     then     mv -f  TMPNAM  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        chmod 400  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        echo  Created new  PROCMAILRC      if        -ne 0    then         echo      FAILED creating  PROCMAILRC      fi else     echo  Didn t update  PROCMAILRC  fi   The script hasn t yet prevented any email disasters  but it has made me less anxious about changing my procmailrc

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I like how git figures out when to use less  subversion doesn t have that feature so I want to easily get colored output in a pager  the cgrep alias lets me choose quickly  without it there are times I get raw color output   I also  when grepping through code  don t like to see certain results  like  svn ctags binary files  grep -R sourcecodetext sourcedir   nosvn   Below is what I have in my config files  cat  bash profile  alias nosvn  grep -v     svn  tags  cscope  Binary    alias less  less -R  alias diff  colordiff -u  alias cgrep  grep --color always   export GREP OPTIONS  --color auto    cat bin gitdiffwrapper     bin bash  old file  1 tmp file  2 old hex  3 old mode  4 new file  5 new mode  6  colordiff -u  old file  tmp file   cat  gitconfig    diff      external    HOME bin gitdiffwrapper   cat  subversion config    grep  diff-cmd  diff-cmd    usr bin colordiff

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A python script that does a filewalk and prints my directory tree sorted by disk usage

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alias dir  ls -al  is my preferred favorite script

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I wrote a script that ended up being used every day in my team  When I used to work for Intel we had an app that talked to an access database to grab a dump of register information  I worked on validating chipsets   It would take this information  from a SQL query  and dump it into a CSV file  HTML file  and an Excel file  The whole process took almost 2 hours  No joke  No idea why it took so long  We would start it up an hour before lunch  go to lunch  and then come back   I thought that there had to be a better way of doing this  I talked to the team that maintained the registry database and got the SQL code from them  I then wrote a perl script that grabbed the data and outputted it into CSV  HTML  and Excel formats  Runtime  Around 1-2 seconds  A great speed improvement   I also wrote a few scripts while I was on deployment in Iraq in 2006  I served in the National Guard for 9 years - got out in December   We used this old app called ULLS-G  Unit Level Logistics System - Ground  that was written in ADA and originally ran on DOS  They hacked it enough to where it would run on Windows XP in a command shell  This system didn t have a mouse interface  Everything was via keyboard and it had NO batch functionality  So let s say you wanted to print out licenses for all vehicle operators  Well    we had 150 soldiers in our unit so it took a LONG time  Let s say everyone got qualified on a new vehicle and you wanted to add it to everyone s operator qualifications  You had to do it one by one   I was able to find an ODBC driver for the SAGE database  what ULLS-G used  and so I wrote perl scripts that were able to talk to the SAGE database  So things that took over an hour  now took only a few seconds  I also used my scripts and the driver for reporting  We had to report all information up to battalion every morning  Other units would write the information in by hand every morning  I whipped up an Excel macro that talked used the same driver and talked to the SAGE database and updated the Excel spreadsheet that way  It s the most complicated and only Excel macro I ve ever written  It paid off because they awarded me the Army Commendation Medal  So yeah  I got a medal in the military for writing perl scripts    How many can say that

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As a scheduled task  to copy any modified new files from entire drive d  to backup drive g   and to log the files copied   It helps me keep track of what I did when  as well   justdate is a small program to prints the date and time to the screen  g   cd  drive d  d   cd    type g  backup d log    g  logs backup d log  echo                                               g  backup d log  d  mu bmutil justdate    g  backup d log  xcopy  s  d  y  c   g  drive d    g  backup d log

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Wrote a little bash script that knew just enough about fonts to search through about 10k fonts and look for certain key words  in spite of their useless filenames but not return very many false positives   Took a while to run  about a minute on the dinky iMac  but it has saved me probably 50 hrs over the course of the last few years

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On Windows XP  I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C    dir  s  b    gt  dirlist txt   This lists the full path of all files on the C drive  Then whenever I need to find a file  I can use findstr  This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path  For example   findstr   jpg  dirlist txt findstr  i  r  windows  system32  png   dirlist txt   This is a very fast solution to set up  and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection   If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern  first list all of the files you need to check  then search within them  For example  to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this   findstr    java   py  dirlist txt  gt  narrowlist txt findstr  i  r  f narrowlist txt  flip  image

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alias dir  ls -al  is my preferred favorite script

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I don t have the code any more  but possibly the most useful script I wrote was  believe it or not  in VBA   I had an annoying colleague who had such a short fuse that I referred to him as Cherry Bomb   He would often get mad when customers would call and then stand up and start ranting at me over the cubicle wall  killing my productivity and morale   I always had Microsoft Excel open   When he would do this  I would alt-tab to Excel and there  on the toolbar  was a new icon with an image of a cherry bomb   I would discreetly click that     and nothing would happen   However  shortly after that I would get a phone call and would say something like  yeah  yeah  that sounds bad   I had better take a look    And then I would get up  apologize to the Cherry Bomb and walk away   What happened is that we used NetWare and it had a primitive messaging system built in   When I clicked the button  a small VBA script would send out a NetWare message to my friends  telling them that the Cherry Bomb was at it again and would they please call me   He never figured it out

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I use this as an autoloaded function  I can just type  mycd  and a list of directories appears which I frequently cd to  If I happen to know then number I can just say something like  mycd 2   To add a directory to the list you just type  mycd  tmp foo somedirectory    function mycd    MYCD  tmp mycd txt touch   MYCD   typeset -i x typeset -i ITEM NO typeset -i i x 0  if    -n    1       then    if    -d    1       then       print    1    gt  gt    MYCD        sort -u   MYCD   gt    MYCD  tmp       mv   MYCD  tmp   MYCD        FOLDER   1     else       i   1        FOLDER   sed -n    i p    MYCD      fi fi  if    -z    1       then    print       cat   MYCD    while read f  do       x   expr   x    1        print    x     f      done    print   nSelect       read ITEM NO    FOLDER   sed -n    ITEM NO p    MYCD   fi  if    -d    FOLDER       then    cd   FOLDER  fi

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I like to store my photos in a directory based on the date the picture was taken  Therefore I wrote a program that would scan a memory card for pictures  create any folders on my hard disk that it needed to based on the dates of the pictures  then copy them in

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This  from a posting in my blog a few months ago  has gone from being an idea that I thought was cool to one of the best little hacks I ve coughed up in recent memory   I quote it in full here                       I spend a lot of time in bash   For the uninitiated  bash is a system that you ll find on most unix machines and  thankfully  some windows and every Mac out there   At first blush  it s no more than a command-line interface  and therefore off the radar of most users who see such things as an anachronism they d rather forget   I do nearly everything in bash   I READ MY EMAIL FROM A COMMAND LINE  which is why I eschew marked-up email   I navigate directories  edit files  engage in my daily source code checkout and delivery  search for files  search inside files  reboot my machine  and even occasionally browse web pages from the command line  bash is the heart and soul of my digital existence   The trouble is that I tend to have about 6 bash windows open at a time   At work today  I had one running a web server  another fiddling with my database  a third  fourth  and fifth editing different files  while a sixth was grinding away through my machine trying to record the names of every file on the system  Why   Because it s handy to be able to search through such an archive if you want to know where to find an object by filename   When you do this  you end up with lots of windows in your control bar named simply   bash    This is fine if you only have one of them  but its agony when you have 6 or more     and two dozen other things going on   I have three monitors under the simultaneous command of one keyboard mouse pair and I still feel the need for more   Each of those windows has several bash terminals open   So I ve plunked this together   First  place these lines in your  bash profile     export PROMPT COMMAND  export TRIM    bin trim pl     export PS1     e 0   TRIM a    TRIM gt      trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   I went through and wrote dozens of paragraphs on how this all works and exactly why it is set up the way it is  but you re not really interested   Trust me   There is an entire chapter of a book in why I did  CMD      echo     on that third line   Many people  including bluehost  where my other domain is hosted  are still using and old version of bash with major bugs in how it handles traps  so we re stuck with this   You can remove the CMD and replace it with  BASH COMMAND if you are current on your bash version and feel like doing the research   Anyway  the first script I use is here   It creates a nice prompt that contains your machine name and directory  chopped down to a reasonable length                                      trim pl                 usr bin perl     It seems that my cygwin box doesn t have HOSTNAME available in the     environment - at least not to scripts - so I m getting it elsewhere    open  IN    usr bin hostname        hostname    lt IN gt     close  IN      hostname        A-Za-z0-9-         host short    1      preamble         if  length  ENV  PWD    gt 37       ENV  PWD          1 37         path short    1     print   host short   preamble path short                                                             There s a warning at the top of this blog post that you should read now before you start asking stupid questions like   Why didn t you just use the HOSTNAME environment variable via  ENV    Simple   Because that doesn t work for all the systems I tried it on     Now for the really cool bit   Remember line 3 of the  bash profile addition     trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   It s dumping the trim pl script output in the same container as before  printing to both the command prompt and the window title  but this time it s adding the command that you just typed   This is why you don t want to be doing all of this in your  bashrc  any script you run  on my machine  man is one of them  will trigger this thing on every line   man s output gets seriously garbled by what we re doing here   We re not exactly playing nice with the terminal   To grab the command you just typed  we take the bash s history and dice it up a bit                                      hist pl                usr bin perl  while   lt STDIN gt              line         chomp  line   line        27        print  1                                                           So now  I have a bazillion windows going and they say things like     castro   home ronb blog   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot script server   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot mysql -u ron -p   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot find    gt   C ronb system map   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot vi app views cart html erb   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 protect   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 sync -f   Ron-D630   C perforce depot    From the happy little bar at the bottom of the screen  I can now tell which is which at a moment s glance   And because we ve set PS1  as soon as a command finishes executing  the command name is replaced by just the output of trim pl again   UPDATE  same day     This stuff  the  bash profile entries  laid all kinds of hell on me when I   tried it in my  bashrc   Your  bashrc is executed by non-interactive scripts   whenever you invoke bash as a language   I hit this when I was trying to use   man   All sorts of garbage  the complete text of my  bashrc  plus escape   charecters  showed up at the top of the man page   I would suggest testing   this gem with a quick  man man  invocation at the command line once you get   it all together   I guess it s time for me to pull the custom garbage out of my  bashrc and put   it where it belongs     Incedentally  I found myself typing  man trap  at one point in this process

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A script that reads a config file in the current dir  logs into an FTP account  and uploads all files that have changed since the last time it was run  Really handy for clients who use shared hosting  and FTP is my only option for file access   http   lucasoman com code updater

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As a scheduled task  to copy any modified new files from entire drive d  to backup drive g   and to log the files copied   It helps me keep track of what I did when  as well   justdate is a small program to prints the date and time to the screen  g   cd  drive d  d   cd    type g  backup d log    g  logs backup d log  echo                                               g  backup d log  d  mu bmutil justdate    g  backup d log  xcopy  s  d  y  c   g  drive d    g  backup d log

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A little script that monitors some popular websites for ads that match my skills and email me an email

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Mass file renaming via drag amp drop   Ages ago I ve made a small VBScript that accepts a RegEx and replaces file names accordingly  You would simply drop a bunch of files or folders on it  I found that to be very useful throughout the years   gist github com 15824  Beware  the comments are in German

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A simple all around shell function  Just when I get too lazy to think about what I am trying to do   Really useful when I am just browsing around some random directory  and I have to switch from ls  to cd  to less constantly   en     if    -z  1      then ls      elif    -d  1      then cd  1  elif    -f  1      then less  lt  1 fi

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backup sh  that tars up the contents of a directory and sends it to my gmail account

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A few years ago I wrote a winforms app with the help of a few win32 api s to completely lock myself out of my computer for an hour so that it would force me to go and exercise  Because I was lazy  No    because I had a personal fitness goal  Sometimes you just need a little kick to get started

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A script that reads a config file in the current dir  logs into an FTP account  and uploads all files that have changed since the last time it was run  Really handy for clients who use shared hosting  and FTP is my only option for file access   http   lucasoman com code updater

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Wrote a script to click my start button  then click it again in half a second  and repeat every 30 seconds   Keeps me marked Online while at work  and I can get the real work done on my personal laptop right next to it  Not bogged down by work software   Don t tell the boss

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Well back in 2005 I used Gentoo Linux and I used a lot a small program called genlop to show me the history of what I ve emerged  installed  on my gentoo box  Well to simplify my work I ve written not a small python script but a large one  but at that time I just started using python          usr bin python                                                  Gentoo emerge status                     This script requires genlop                   you can install it using  emerge genlop        Milot Shala  lt milot mymyah com gt                                                           import sys import os import time   colors color    color  r     x1b 31 01m  color  g     x1b 32 01m  color  b     x1b 34 01m  color  0     x1b 0m    def r txt      return color  r   txt color  0   def g txt      return color  g   txt color  0   def b txt      return color  b   txt color  0      View Options def view opt           print    print    print g  full-info - View full information for emerged package      print g  cur - View current emerge      print g  hist - View history of emerged packages by day      print g  hist-all - View full list of history of emerged packages      print g  rsync - View rsync history      print g  time - View time for compiling a package      print g  time-unmerged - View time of unmerged packages      print    command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main        if command              c         program      else        c         program      system command  clear  def c       os system  clear       Base program def program       c      print g  Gentoo emerge status script      print   ---------------------------      print     print   1      g   Enter options      print   2      g   View options      print   3      g   Exit      print    command   input     gt          if command    1           print       print r    First of all  you must view options to know what to use  you can enter option name   if you know any   or type  view-opt  to view options            print       time sleep 2        command   raw input b  Option name            if  command     view-opt  or command     VIEW-OPT             view opt           elif command     full-info            c            print g  Full information for a single package            print   -------------------------------------            print          print b  Enter package name            command raw input   gt              c            print g  Full information for package    b command           print   -----------------------------------            print          pack   genlop -i   command           pack      join pack           os system pack            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main             command raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     cur            if command     cur               c               print g  Current emerge session s                print   -------------------------               print             print b  Listing current emerge session s                print             time sleep 1              os system  genlop -c               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if  command                        c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist            if command     hist               c               print g  History of merged packages               print   ---------------------------               print             time sleep 1              print b  Enter number of how many days ago you want to see the packages               command   raw input   gt                 c               print g  Packages merged   b command   g   day s  before                print   ------------------------------------               pkg   genlop --list --date   command   days ago               pkg      join pkg              os system pkg               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist-all               c               print g  Full history of merged individual packages               print   --------------------------------------               print             print b  Do you want to view individual package                print r  YES NO                command   raw input   gt                 print             if  command     yes  or command     YES                   print g  Enter package name                  command   raw input   gt                    print                pkg   genlop -l   grep   command      less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                  else                    c                     program                elif  command     no  or command     NO                   pkg   genlop -l   less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                   else                    c                     program                else                 c                  program           elif command     rsync            print g  RSYNC updates            print          print          print          print b  You can view rsynced time by year             print r  Do you want this script to do it for you   yes no             command   raw input   gt              if  command     yes  or command     YES                print             print g  Enter year i e    b  2005               print             command   raw input   gt                 rsync   genlop -r   grep   command     less               rsync      join rsync              os system rsync               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                c               program            elif  command     no  or command     NO                os system  genlop -r   less               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program          elif command     time            c            print g  Time of package compilation            print   ---------------------------            print          print           print b  Enter package name            pkg name   raw input   gt              pkg   emerge   pkg name   -p   genlop -p   less            pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     time-unmerged            c            print g  Show when package s  is when is unmerged            print   ----------------------------------------            print           print b  Enter package name              name   raw input   gt              pkg   genlop -u   name           pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program          else           print          print r  Wrong Selection             time sleep 2           c            program        elif command    2        view opt         command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main           if command                 c            program         else           c            program        elif command    3        print       print b  Thank you for using this script         print       time sleep 1        sys exit       else        print       print r  Wrong Selection          time sleep 2        c         program         command          program

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As a scheduled task  to copy any modified new files from entire drive d  to backup drive g   and to log the files copied   It helps me keep track of what I did when  as well   justdate is a small program to prints the date and time to the screen  g   cd  drive d  d   cd    type g  backup d log    g  logs backup d log  echo                                               g  backup d log  d  mu bmutil justdate    g  backup d log  xcopy  s  d  y  c   g  drive d    g  backup d log

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I wrote a cron job to grab the ip address of my dads router and ftp it to a secure location so when he needed help I could remote desktop in and fix his comp

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This keeps 20 days of diff backups without using a bunch of space  Uses links to copy and rsync copies as necessary      bin bash                                                                                                                                                                                                                               BACKUPDIR  media proxy store backups                                                                                                                                                                                                         -d  BACKUPDIR        echo  BACKUP DIRECTORY NOT AVAILABLE    exit                                                                                                                                                                    dobackup                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        SDIR  2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 PARENTDIR  1                                                                                                                                                                                                                            echo  BACKING UP  PARENTDIR  SDIR to  BACKUPDIR                                                                                                                                                                                         bnum 20         count  bnum           -d   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   bnum         mv   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   bnum   BACKUPDIR   SDIR  tmp            until    count -eq 1    do                 let lastdir  count-1                   -d   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   lastdir        mv   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   lastdir   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   count                    let count- 1         done         cp -al    BACKUPDIR   SDIR  0    BACKUPDIR   SDIR  1         rsync -a --delete --bwlimit 2000   PARENTDIR  SDIR   BACKUPDIR   SDIR  0    for backup in   cat  sbin backup directories   do         PDIR   echo  backup   awk -F        print 1            DIR   echo  backup   awk -F        print 2            dobackup  PDIR  DIR done  exit    cat  sbin backup directories  media warehouse  Archive  media warehouse  concept

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Not every day  but I did use XSLT script to create my wedding invitations  a Pages file for the inserts to the invite cards  and an HTML file for the address labels

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A similar backup sh for each project  that tars and gzips just the source  moves it into a snapshot directory and labels it with timestamp  project-mmddyy-hhmmss   Useful for coding between commits

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I wrote a simple VB app that tracked which game numbers of Freecell I had played and successfully completed  and always launched it with a different seed       starting from 1      Max game number is 65k  Rather sadly after more than 5 years I am still in only the hundreds  But at least I know I ve never played the same hand twice      Postscript - it s the only VB app I ve ever written  I ran screaming back to C

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A little script that monitors some popular websites for ads that match my skills and email me an email

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A script that reads a config file in the current dir  logs into an FTP account  and uploads all files that have changed since the last time it was run  Really handy for clients who use shared hosting  and FTP is my only option for file access   http   lucasoman com code updater

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I wrote a python program to calculate my apartment s shared spending and output a neat little grid  with roommate as the columns and expense category as the row  along with how much money each roommate owed for rent  after adjusting for his contribution toward shared expenses   We d been sharing this way for a while  but just adding up raw totals at the end of the month   I needed more granular control   With a maximum of eight keystrokes per line-item  this is way better than excel  I was sort of on a desperate quest to stop the monthly trend of one roommate spending 25  of our budget on beverages

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I wrote a script for formatting C source files that automatically indents the code using an appropriate combination of tab and space characters  such that the file will appear correct regardless of what the tab setting on your editor is   Source code is here

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VBS script to create a YYYY YYYY-MM YYYY-MM-DD file structure in my photos folder and move photos from my camera to the appropriate folder

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I had a version control script that would take a directory as an argument  and recursively copy all files to    dirname DATE TIME   Obviously it was a crappy way to do things  but it was handy before installing a real version control package

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A Greasemonkey script which removes obviously stupid    comments from gaming site Kotaku com       As identified by common spelling mistakes  all-caps writing  excessive use of  LOL  and similar heuristics

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The most useful  But there are so many      d cmd contains   dir  ad  on dd cmd contains   dir  a-d  on x cmd contains   exit s cmd contains   start   sx cmd contains   start    amp  exit ts cmd contains the following  which allows me to properly connect to another machine s console session over RDP regardless of whether I m on Vista SP1 or not    echo off  ver   find  6 0 6001    if ERRORLEVEL 0 if not errorlevel 1  set TSCONS admin  ELSE set TSCONS console  echo Issuing command  mstsc   TSCONS   v  1  start mstsc   TSCONS   v  1    Sorry for the weird formatting  apparently you can t have more than one code sample per answer    From a command prompt I ll navigate to where my VS solution file is  and then I ll want to open it  but I m too lazy to type blah sln and press enter  So I wrote sln cmd    echo off if not exist   sln goto csproj for   f in    sln  do start  max   f goto end   csproj for   f in    csproj  do start  max   f goto end   end   So I just type sln and press enter and it opens the solution file  if any  in the current directory  I wrap things like pushd and popd in pd cmd and pop cmd

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I have a batch file which runs every morning  which launches a browser with the tabs loaded to all the sites I want to check each day  Woot  Dilbert  Doonesbury  UserFriendly  seasonally  NY Mets scores and electoral-vote com  plus a few websites that need to be visited regularly to keep membership active

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A small task-bar program that extracted every error-code constant out of a third-party JavaDoc and let me lookup the constant-name for a given error code  Plus  add in any conversions from HEX to decimal  etc   This comes up a lot when working in the debugger--you get back the error code  but then tracking back the code to text is a huge pain  It s even more common when working with software that wraps native methods  OS calls  or COM    often times  the constants are copied straight out of an error header file with no additional context  repeated values  and no enumerations

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A few years ago I wrote a winforms app with the help of a few win32 api s to completely lock myself out of my computer for an hour so that it would force me to go and exercise  Because I was lazy  No    because I had a personal fitness goal  Sometimes you just need a little kick to get started

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Work Home ps1 and Work Work ps1    modify the hosts file  to go through LAN or WAN addresses

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Wrote a script to click my start button  then click it again in half a second  and repeat every 30 seconds   Keeps me marked Online while at work  and I can get the real work done on my personal laptop right next to it  Not bogged down by work software   Don t tell the boss

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I used to work at a technology summer camp  and we had to compose these write-ups for each of the kids in the group at the end of the week  which they would then receive and take home as a keepsake   Usually  these consisted of a bunch of generic sentences  and one to two personalized sentences   I wrote a python script which constructed one of these write-ups out of a bank of canned sentences  and allowed the user to add a couple of personalized sentences in the middle   This saved a huge amount of time for me and other counselors I let in on the secret   Even though so much of it was automated  our write-ups still looked better than many of the  honest  ones  because we could put more time into the personalized parts

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I got a script which extracts id3 tags encodes the songs newly in a certain format  and then adds them according to the tags to my music library   300 lines of python  Mostly because lame isn t able to deal with tags in a nice fashion

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Well back in 2005 I used Gentoo Linux and I used a lot a small program called genlop to show me the history of what I ve emerged  installed  on my gentoo box  Well to simplify my work I ve written not a small python script but a large one  but at that time I just started using python          usr bin python                                                  Gentoo emerge status                     This script requires genlop                   you can install it using  emerge genlop        Milot Shala  lt milot mymyah com gt                                                           import sys import os import time   colors color    color  r     x1b 31 01m  color  g     x1b 32 01m  color  b     x1b 34 01m  color  0     x1b 0m    def r txt      return color  r   txt color  0   def g txt      return color  g   txt color  0   def b txt      return color  b   txt color  0      View Options def view opt           print    print    print g  full-info - View full information for emerged package      print g  cur - View current emerge      print g  hist - View history of emerged packages by day      print g  hist-all - View full list of history of emerged packages      print g  rsync - View rsync history      print g  time - View time for compiling a package      print g  time-unmerged - View time of unmerged packages      print    command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main        if command              c         program      else        c         program      system command  clear  def c       os system  clear       Base program def program       c      print g  Gentoo emerge status script      print   ---------------------------      print     print   1      g   Enter options      print   2      g   View options      print   3      g   Exit      print    command   input     gt          if command    1           print       print r    First of all  you must view options to know what to use  you can enter option name   if you know any   or type  view-opt  to view options            print       time sleep 2        command   raw input b  Option name            if  command     view-opt  or command     VIEW-OPT             view opt           elif command     full-info            c            print g  Full information for a single package            print   -------------------------------------            print          print b  Enter package name            command raw input   gt              c            print g  Full information for package    b command           print   -----------------------------------            print          pack   genlop -i   command           pack      join pack           os system pack            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main             command raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     cur            if command     cur               c               print g  Current emerge session s                print   -------------------------               print             print b  Listing current emerge session s                print             time sleep 1              os system  genlop -c               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if  command                        c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist            if command     hist               c               print g  History of merged packages               print   ---------------------------               print             time sleep 1              print b  Enter number of how many days ago you want to see the packages               command   raw input   gt                 c               print g  Packages merged   b command   g   day s  before                print   ------------------------------------               pkg   genlop --list --date   command   days ago               pkg      join pkg              os system pkg               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist-all               c               print g  Full history of merged individual packages               print   --------------------------------------               print             print b  Do you want to view individual package                print r  YES NO                command   raw input   gt                 print             if  command     yes  or command     YES                   print g  Enter package name                  command   raw input   gt                    print                pkg   genlop -l   grep   command      less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                  else                    c                     program                elif  command     no  or command     NO                   pkg   genlop -l   less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                   else                    c                     program                else                 c                  program           elif command     rsync            print g  RSYNC updates            print          print          print          print b  You can view rsynced time by year             print r  Do you want this script to do it for you   yes no             command   raw input   gt              if  command     yes  or command     YES                print             print g  Enter year i e    b  2005               print             command   raw input   gt                 rsync   genlop -r   grep   command     less               rsync      join rsync              os system rsync               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                c               program            elif  command     no  or command     NO                os system  genlop -r   less               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program          elif command     time            c            print g  Time of package compilation            print   ---------------------------            print          print           print b  Enter package name            pkg name   raw input   gt              pkg   emerge   pkg name   -p   genlop -p   less            pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     time-unmerged            c            print g  Show when package s  is when is unmerged            print   ----------------------------------------            print           print b  Enter package name              name   raw input   gt              pkg   genlop -u   name           pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program          else           print          print r  Wrong Selection             time sleep 2           c            program        elif command    2        view opt         command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main           if command                 c            program         else           c            program        elif command    3        print       print b  Thank you for using this script         print       time sleep 1        sys exit       else        print       print r  Wrong Selection          time sleep 2        c         program         command          program

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A simply Python script that converts line endings from Unix to Windows that I stuck in my system32 directory  It s been lost to the ages for a few months  now  but basically it d convert a list of known text-based file types to Windows line endings  and you could specify which files to convert  or all files  for a wildcard list

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Super remote reset button  A rack of super special simulation hardware  backin the days when a room full of VME crates did less than your GPU  that a user on the other side of the world would crash in the early hours of the morning  It took an hour to get into the lab and through security   But we weren t allowed to connect to the super special controller or modify the hardware  The solution was an old DEC workstation with an epson dot matrix printer  tape a plastic ruler to the paper feed knob  position the printer near the reset button  Log in to the WS as a regular user  no root allowed  all external ports locked down   print a document with 24blank lines - which rotated the paper feed knob and the ruler pressed over the reset on the super special hardware

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bin bash   check to see if site is up     if it is  don t worry     if it s down  restart apache after get a process listing     v 1 Warren M Myers - initial stab       31 Aug 06    ERRCOD  7  WHEN  date   d b y  REPT    psaux  WHEN txt  STARS                         curl -I http   www shodor org  gt   var tmp curlret txt  if            ERRCOD     then       return was unable to connect to host  save ps -aux  mail report     ps -aux  gt   REPT     echo  STARS     echo  curl return results      echo     cat curlret txt     echo     echo  STARS     echo  ps -aux results      cat  REPT     echo     echo  STARS     echo  restarting apache       etc init d apache2 restart     echo  apache restarted      echo     echo  ps -aux results saved in  REPT  fi  rm -f  var tmp curlret txt

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usr bin perl use strict  use utf8  use Encode  use File  Find  binmode STDOUT    utf8   sub orderly       my   x   y        a   b       if  my  z    x  lt   gt   y   return  z       x   length  a       y   length  b      my  z    x  lt   y    x    y      if  substr  a  0   z  eq substr  b  0   z             return  y  lt   gt   x            else           return  a cmp  b          my  conf   map        gt  0   split      acsxL   sub Stat   conf L    lstat   stat  my  dirs       while  defined       shift         if     eq  --    push  dirs   ARGV  last      elsif    -      s            for  split      1                if   exists  conf     or  conf       1 and  conf a  and  conf s                     print STDERR   0  -a   -c   -s   -x   -L   --      n                   exit 1                                    else  push  dirs        s       s for  dirs        SO has crappy syntax highlighting  dirs   qw    unless  dirs  my  spec    follow   gt   conf L   no chdir   gt  1   if   conf a          spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     elsif   conf s          spec wanted    sub           Stat              dirs 0      -f     -s     0           else        spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1            -d   and pop  a          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     if   conf x          spec preprocess    sub           my  dev    Stat  File  Find  dir  0           grep   dev     Stat   File  Find  dir      0                while   dirs        find   spec   dirs 0  eq             dirs 0                      dirs 0   if  conf c       shift  dirs            lt  1024    1   printf   s    -6 6sB    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    0                lt  1024    2   printf   s    -6 6sK    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    1                lt  1024    3   printf   s    -6 6sM    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    2                lt  1024    4   printf   s    -6 6sG    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    3                lt  1024    5   printf   s    -6 6sT    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    4                lt  1024    6   printf   s    -6 6sP    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    5                lt  1024    7   printf   s    -6 6sE    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    6                lt  1024    8   printf   s    -6 6sZ    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    7                             printf   s    -6 6sY    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    8          for grep          gt  0  sort orderly keys       I save it in   bin dush  it acts as a sort of du -h du   sort -n hybrid  sorts and gives human-readable sizes all at once   Very useful for finding what s taking up disk space   In a similar vein      usr bin perl  t   1   p   map       gt    t    1024   qw K M G T P E Z Y    t   4707319808  if   ARGV        if        shift       - dvd i    t   4707319808      elsif    - cd  w    i    t   737280000      elsif    - cd i    t   681984000      elsif    -    d      kmgtpezy   i    t    1     p   U 2      1       elsif    -    d         t    1      else  unshift  ARGV          q   r   s     0    ENV COLUMNS     80  - 13   t   while   lt  gt         chomp  stat      unless  -e              print STDERR     does not exist n           next            if    s    -s     gt   t             s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n               sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s          printf  ----------- d  s n      q   r   -  x  r           s   -s              printf   8s  s n           sprintf   3 3f      s   100    t              4     r    s        1           s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n       sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s    I save this as   bin fit   When I m archiving a bunch of files  I run ls   fit or ls   fit -cdrw to help determine if it ll fit on a DVD CD CDRW  and where to split them if they don t

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I wrote a script that ended up being used every day in my team  When I used to work for Intel we had an app that talked to an access database to grab a dump of register information  I worked on validating chipsets   It would take this information  from a SQL query  and dump it into a CSV file  HTML file  and an Excel file  The whole process took almost 2 hours  No joke  No idea why it took so long  We would start it up an hour before lunch  go to lunch  and then come back   I thought that there had to be a better way of doing this  I talked to the team that maintained the registry database and got the SQL code from them  I then wrote a perl script that grabbed the data and outputted it into CSV  HTML  and Excel formats  Runtime  Around 1-2 seconds  A great speed improvement   I also wrote a few scripts while I was on deployment in Iraq in 2006  I served in the National Guard for 9 years - got out in December   We used this old app called ULLS-G  Unit Level Logistics System - Ground  that was written in ADA and originally ran on DOS  They hacked it enough to where it would run on Windows XP in a command shell  This system didn t have a mouse interface  Everything was via keyboard and it had NO batch functionality  So let s say you wanted to print out licenses for all vehicle operators  Well    we had 150 soldiers in our unit so it took a LONG time  Let s say everyone got qualified on a new vehicle and you wanted to add it to everyone s operator qualifications  You had to do it one by one   I was able to find an ODBC driver for the SAGE database  what ULLS-G used  and so I wrote perl scripts that were able to talk to the SAGE database  So things that took over an hour  now took only a few seconds  I also used my scripts and the driver for reporting  We had to report all information up to battalion every morning  Other units would write the information in by hand every morning  I whipped up an Excel macro that talked used the same driver and talked to the SAGE database and updated the Excel spreadsheet that way  It s the most complicated and only Excel macro I ve ever written  It paid off because they awarded me the Army Commendation Medal  So yeah  I got a medal in the military for writing perl scripts    How many can say that

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I use procmail to sort my incoming email to different folders  Because I have trouble remembering the procmailrc syntax  I use m4 as a preprocessor  Here s how my procmailrc begins  this isn t the script yet    divert -1  changequote  lt  lt    gt  gt   define mailinglistrule    lt  lt  0     2 Lists  1  gt  gt   define listdt   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  Delivered-To    2  gt  gt   define listid   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  List-Id    lt  2 gt   gt  gt   divert  Generated from  procmailrc m4 -- DO NOT EDIT   This defines two macros for mailing lists  so e g  listdt foo  foo example com  expands to   0     Delivered-To   foo example com Lists foo   meaning that emails with a Delivered-To header containing foo example com should be put in the Lists foo folder  It also arranges the processed file to begin with a comment that warns me not to edit that file directly   Now  frankly  m4 scares me  what if I accidentally redefine a macro and procmail starts discarding all my email  or something like that  That s why I have a script  which I call update-procmailrc  that shows me in diff format how my procmailrc is going to change  If the change is just a few lines and looks roughly like what I intended  I can happily approve it  but if there are huge changes to the file  I know to look at my edits more carefully       bin sh  PROCMAILRC  procmailrc TMPNAM  procmailrc tmp    cd  HOME umask 077 trap  rm -f  TMPNAM  0  m4  lt   procmailrc m4  gt   TMPNAM diff -u  PROCMAILRC  TMPNAM  echo -n  Is this acceptable   y N    read accept  if   -z   accept     then     accept n fi  if    accept    y  -o  accept    Y     then     mv -f  TMPNAM  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        chmod 400  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        echo  Created new  PROCMAILRC      if        -ne 0    then         echo      FAILED creating  PROCMAILRC      fi else     echo  Didn t update  PROCMAILRC  fi   The script hasn t yet prevented any email disasters  but it has made me less anxious about changing my procmailrc

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I used to work at a technology summer camp  and we had to compose these write-ups for each of the kids in the group at the end of the week  which they would then receive and take home as a keepsake   Usually  these consisted of a bunch of generic sentences  and one to two personalized sentences   I wrote a python script which constructed one of these write-ups out of a bank of canned sentences  and allowed the user to add a couple of personalized sentences in the middle   This saved a huge amount of time for me and other counselors I let in on the secret   Even though so much of it was automated  our write-ups still looked better than many of the  honest  ones  because we could put more time into the personalized parts

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A script to allow easy greping of ps results      usr bin php -f  lt  php  process    argv 1   echo shell exec  ps -ef   grep  process   grep -v grep    exit 0

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My o key fell off on my laptop  so I wrote a program that replaces two 0 keystrokes within 200 MS of each other as an o  two 0 keystrokes within 700 MS of each other as a 0 and ignore the rest  so I could use my laptop before I get around to replacing the keyboard   Wow  I didn t know this would be so popular  p  As for how - Microsoft exposes a nice little API feature called Hooks   Using that hook  I was able to write a  filter  that did what I needed it to do  hint  if you return 1 with your callback windows will not process the keystroke    The reason I know about this actually is not because I was writing a keylogger - but because I wrote a program smiler to Synergy a while ago   And yes  I did write another program that swapped alpha-numeric keys with a random alpha-numeric key and yes  it was really funny  D

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I don t have the code any more  but possibly the most useful script I wrote was  believe it or not  in VBA   I had an annoying colleague who had such a short fuse that I referred to him as Cherry Bomb   He would often get mad when customers would call and then stand up and start ranting at me over the cubicle wall  killing my productivity and morale   I always had Microsoft Excel open   When he would do this  I would alt-tab to Excel and there  on the toolbar  was a new icon with an image of a cherry bomb   I would discreetly click that     and nothing would happen   However  shortly after that I would get a phone call and would say something like  yeah  yeah  that sounds bad   I had better take a look    And then I would get up  apologize to the Cherry Bomb and walk away   What happened is that we used NetWare and it had a primitive messaging system built in   When I clicked the button  a small VBA script would send out a NetWare message to my friends  telling them that the Cherry Bomb was at it again and would they please call me   He never figured it out

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alias snoot  find     -path     svn   -print0   xargs -0 egrep

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I suppose I should include my own answer to this  for completion s sake    I wrote a simple script that takes in the expenses of two people living together  and calculates which person owes the other money at the end of the month so that each person spent equally  I plan to extend it to store the categories of each expense and store them in a database  Sure  I could just use existing software   but where s the fun in that   Not very complex  sure  but as far as non-work related scripts that I use a lot at home  this one is the current leader

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I wrote a file extraction tool to be used in Linux  that can extract about 20 different file formats and uses the file content  not the file name   This tool got quite popular  I have a regular stream of people who download it from my blog  Get it here    E - Extract Any Archive

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A script that runs hourly to retrain my spam filters based two IMAP folder where span and ham are put      bin sh FNDIR  train-as-spam  FPDIR  train-as-ham   for dir in  home    maildir do     cd    dir       USER  stat -c  U         SRCDIR    dir     FNDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class spam --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi      SRCDIR    dir     FPDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class innocent --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi  done

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Super remote reset button  A rack of super special simulation hardware  backin the days when a room full of VME crates did less than your GPU  that a user on the other side of the world would crash in the early hours of the morning  It took an hour to get into the lab and through security   But we weren t allowed to connect to the super special controller or modify the hardware  The solution was an old DEC workstation with an epson dot matrix printer  tape a plastic ruler to the paper feed knob  position the printer near the reset button  Log in to the WS as a regular user  no root allowed  all external ports locked down   print a document with 24blank lines - which rotated the paper feed knob and the ruler pressed over the reset on the super special hardware

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VBS script to create a YYYY YYYY-MM YYYY-MM-DD file structure in my photos folder and move photos from my camera to the appropriate folder

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My o key fell off on my laptop  so I wrote a program that replaces two 0 keystrokes within 200 MS of each other as an o  two 0 keystrokes within 700 MS of each other as a 0 and ignore the rest  so I could use my laptop before I get around to replacing the keyboard   Wow  I didn t know this would be so popular  p  As for how - Microsoft exposes a nice little API feature called Hooks   Using that hook  I was able to write a  filter  that did what I needed it to do  hint  if you return 1 with your callback windows will not process the keystroke    The reason I know about this actually is not because I was writing a keylogger - but because I wrote a program smiler to Synergy a while ago   And yes  I did write another program that swapped alpha-numeric keys with a random alpha-numeric key and yes  it was really funny  D

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The most useful  But there are so many      d cmd contains   dir  ad  on dd cmd contains   dir  a-d  on x cmd contains   exit s cmd contains   start   sx cmd contains   start    amp  exit ts cmd contains the following  which allows me to properly connect to another machine s console session over RDP regardless of whether I m on Vista SP1 or not    echo off  ver   find  6 0 6001    if ERRORLEVEL 0 if not errorlevel 1  set TSCONS admin  ELSE set TSCONS console  echo Issuing command  mstsc   TSCONS   v  1  start mstsc   TSCONS   v  1    Sorry for the weird formatting  apparently you can t have more than one code sample per answer    From a command prompt I ll navigate to where my VS solution file is  and then I ll want to open it  but I m too lazy to type blah sln and press enter  So I wrote sln cmd    echo off if not exist   sln goto csproj for   f in    sln  do start  max   f goto end   csproj for   f in    csproj  do start  max   f goto end   end   So I just type sln and press enter and it opens the solution file  if any  in the current directory  I wrap things like pushd and popd in pd cmd and pop cmd

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I have a batch file which establishes a VPN connection and then enters an infinite loop  pinging a machine on the other side of the connection every five minutes so that the VPN server doesn t drop the connection due to inactivity if I don t generate any traffic over that connection for a while

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Not every day  but I did use XSLT script to create my wedding invitations  a Pages file for the inserts to the invite cards  and an HTML file for the address labels

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At my previous place of work office hours were ridiculous  It was a software company and my boss was sucked  He would give us work right around 5 30PM  right when it was time to go home  and made us finish the job until past 11 00PM  way past our ideal productive hours   Or he would find annoying problems in code that was still in progress   So I made a batch file and a script that would turn my computer OFF at a random time between 7 00PM and 8 00PM  It had a 1 minute timer just in case I would stay after hours and needed to abort the shutdown process   But I would leave my desk before 5 00PM so he couldn t find me to keep me if he wanted to dump crap around checkout time  If he came to my desk and see my computer on  he would think I was still around the pantry area or at the nearby minimart to grab some chips or something  But if it was off around that time  he would call my cell phone and tell me to get back to the office   I also scheduled the BIOS on my machine to turn my machine ON around 8 00AM or 9 00AM in case I felt lazy and wanted to stroll in around 10 00AM or 11 00AM  If I got caught walking to my desk he would ask  where have you been all morning   And I would say  I was at a meeting with the marketing team   or  I was out getting breakfast    dumb dog

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I use procmail to sort my incoming email to different folders  Because I have trouble remembering the procmailrc syntax  I use m4 as a preprocessor  Here s how my procmailrc begins  this isn t the script yet    divert -1  changequote  lt  lt    gt  gt   define mailinglistrule    lt  lt  0     2 Lists  1  gt  gt   define listdt   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  Delivered-To    2  gt  gt   define listid   lt  lt mailinglistrule  1  List-Id    lt  2 gt   gt  gt   divert  Generated from  procmailrc m4 -- DO NOT EDIT   This defines two macros for mailing lists  so e g  listdt foo  foo example com  expands to   0     Delivered-To   foo example com Lists foo   meaning that emails with a Delivered-To header containing foo example com should be put in the Lists foo folder  It also arranges the processed file to begin with a comment that warns me not to edit that file directly   Now  frankly  m4 scares me  what if I accidentally redefine a macro and procmail starts discarding all my email  or something like that  That s why I have a script  which I call update-procmailrc  that shows me in diff format how my procmailrc is going to change  If the change is just a few lines and looks roughly like what I intended  I can happily approve it  but if there are huge changes to the file  I know to look at my edits more carefully       bin sh  PROCMAILRC  procmailrc TMPNAM  procmailrc tmp    cd  HOME umask 077 trap  rm -f  TMPNAM  0  m4  lt   procmailrc m4  gt   TMPNAM diff -u  PROCMAILRC  TMPNAM  echo -n  Is this acceptable   y N    read accept  if   -z   accept     then     accept n fi  if    accept    y  -o  accept    Y     then     mv -f  TMPNAM  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        chmod 400  PROCMAILRC  amp  amp        echo  Created new  PROCMAILRC      if        -ne 0    then         echo      FAILED creating  PROCMAILRC      fi else     echo  Didn t update  PROCMAILRC  fi   The script hasn t yet prevented any email disasters  but it has made me less anxious about changing my procmailrc

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A script that runs hourly to retrain my spam filters based two IMAP folder where span and ham are put      bin sh FNDIR  train-as-spam  FPDIR  train-as-ham   for dir in  home    maildir do     cd    dir       USER  stat -c  U         SRCDIR    dir     FNDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class spam --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi      SRCDIR    dir     FPDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class innocent --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi  done

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Anime CRC32 checksum      usr bin python                                                                                                                                                                                    import sys  re  zlib  c null     00 00m  c red     31 01m  c green     32 01m   def crc checksum filename       filedata   open filename   rb   read       sum   zlib crc32 filedata      if sum  lt  0          sum  amp   16  8-1     return    8X    sum   for file in sys argv 1        sum   crc checksum file      try          dest sum   re split           file  -2          if sum    dest sum              c in   c green         else              c in   c red         sfile   file split dest sum          print   s s s    s s s s s     c in  sum  c null  sfile 0   c in  dest sum  c null  sfile 1       except IndexError          print   s    s    sum  file

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Well back in 2005 I used Gentoo Linux and I used a lot a small program called genlop to show me the history of what I ve emerged  installed  on my gentoo box  Well to simplify my work I ve written not a small python script but a large one  but at that time I just started using python          usr bin python                                                  Gentoo emerge status                     This script requires genlop                   you can install it using  emerge genlop        Milot Shala  lt milot mymyah com gt                                                           import sys import os import time   colors color    color  r     x1b 31 01m  color  g     x1b 32 01m  color  b     x1b 34 01m  color  0     x1b 0m    def r txt      return color  r   txt color  0   def g txt      return color  g   txt color  0   def b txt      return color  b   txt color  0      View Options def view opt           print    print    print g  full-info - View full information for emerged package      print g  cur - View current emerge      print g  hist - View history of emerged packages by day      print g  hist-all - View full list of history of emerged packages      print g  rsync - View rsync history      print g  time - View time for compiling a package      print g  time-unmerged - View time of unmerged packages      print    command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main        if command              c         program      else        c         program      system command  clear  def c       os system  clear       Base program def program       c      print g  Gentoo emerge status script      print   ---------------------------      print     print   1      g   Enter options      print   2      g   View options      print   3      g   Exit      print    command   input     gt          if command    1           print       print r    First of all  you must view options to know what to use  you can enter option name   if you know any   or type  view-opt  to view options            print       time sleep 2        command   raw input b  Option name            if  command     view-opt  or command     VIEW-OPT             view opt           elif command     full-info            c            print g  Full information for a single package            print   -------------------------------------            print          print b  Enter package name            command raw input   gt              c            print g  Full information for package    b command           print   -----------------------------------            print          pack   genlop -i   command           pack      join pack           os system pack            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main             command raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     cur            if command     cur               c               print g  Current emerge session s                print   -------------------------               print             print b  Listing current emerge session s                print             time sleep 1              os system  genlop -c               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if  command                        c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist            if command     hist               c               print g  History of merged packages               print   ---------------------------               print             time sleep 1              print b  Enter number of how many days ago you want to see the packages               command   raw input   gt                 c               print g  Packages merged   b command   g   day s  before                print   ------------------------------------               pkg   genlop --list --date   command   days ago               pkg      join pkg              os system pkg               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist-all               c               print g  Full history of merged individual packages               print   --------------------------------------               print             print b  Do you want to view individual package                print r  YES NO                command   raw input   gt                 print             if  command     yes  or command     YES                   print g  Enter package name                  command   raw input   gt                    print                pkg   genlop -l   grep   command      less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                  else                    c                     program                elif  command     no  or command     NO                   pkg   genlop -l   less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                   else                    c                     program                else                 c                  program           elif command     rsync            print g  RSYNC updates            print          print          print          print b  You can view rsynced time by year             print r  Do you want this script to do it for you   yes no             command   raw input   gt              if  command     yes  or command     YES                print             print g  Enter year i e    b  2005               print             command   raw input   gt                 rsync   genlop -r   grep   command     less               rsync      join rsync              os system rsync               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                c               program            elif  command     no  or command     NO                os system  genlop -r   less               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program          elif command     time            c            print g  Time of package compilation            print   ---------------------------            print          print           print b  Enter package name            pkg name   raw input   gt              pkg   emerge   pkg name   -p   genlop -p   less            pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     time-unmerged            c            print g  Show when package s  is when is unmerged            print   ----------------------------------------            print           print b  Enter package name              name   raw input   gt              pkg   genlop -u   name           pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program          else           print          print r  Wrong Selection             time sleep 2           c            program        elif command    2        view opt         command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main           if command                 c            program         else           c            program        elif command    3        print       print b  Thank you for using this script         print       time sleep 1        sys exit       else        print       print r  Wrong Selection          time sleep 2        c         program         command          program

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Super remote reset button  A rack of super special simulation hardware  backin the days when a room full of VME crates did less than your GPU  that a user on the other side of the world would crash in the early hours of the morning  It took an hour to get into the lab and through security   But we weren t allowed to connect to the super special controller or modify the hardware  The solution was an old DEC workstation with an epson dot matrix printer  tape a plastic ruler to the paper feed knob  position the printer near the reset button  Log in to the WS as a regular user  no root allowed  all external ports locked down   print a document with 24blank lines - which rotated the paper feed knob and the ruler pressed over the reset on the super special hardware

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At my previous place of work office hours were ridiculous  It was a software company and my boss was sucked  He would give us work right around 5 30PM  right when it was time to go home  and made us finish the job until past 11 00PM  way past our ideal productive hours   Or he would find annoying problems in code that was still in progress   So I made a batch file and a script that would turn my computer OFF at a random time between 7 00PM and 8 00PM  It had a 1 minute timer just in case I would stay after hours and needed to abort the shutdown process   But I would leave my desk before 5 00PM so he couldn t find me to keep me if he wanted to dump crap around checkout time  If he came to my desk and see my computer on  he would think I was still around the pantry area or at the nearby minimart to grab some chips or something  But if it was off around that time  he would call my cell phone and tell me to get back to the office   I also scheduled the BIOS on my machine to turn my machine ON around 8 00AM or 9 00AM in case I felt lazy and wanted to stroll in around 10 00AM or 11 00AM  If I got caught walking to my desk he would ask  where have you been all morning   And I would say  I was at a meeting with the marketing team   or  I was out getting breakfast    dumb dog

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A Greasemonkey script which removes obviously stupid    comments from gaming site Kotaku com       As identified by common spelling mistakes  all-caps writing  excessive use of  LOL  and similar heuristics

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I got a script which extracts id3 tags encodes the songs newly in a certain format  and then adds them according to the tags to my music library   300 lines of python  Mostly because lame isn t able to deal with tags in a nice fashion

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A bash script called up so that if I m in  a very deeply nested path somewhere and I want to go  up  N directories  I can type up N      bin bash LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P   For example    a very deeply nested path somewhere gt  up 4  a very gt     NB by gmatt   Working off the great work above  it can be extended to a back function by placing the following into your bashrc   function up      LIMIT  1 P  PWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P  P    done cd  P export MPWD  P    function back      LIMIT  1 P  MPWD for   i 1  i  lt   LIMIT  i     do     P   P      done cd  P export MPWD  P

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This  from a posting in my blog a few months ago  has gone from being an idea that I thought was cool to one of the best little hacks I ve coughed up in recent memory   I quote it in full here                       I spend a lot of time in bash   For the uninitiated  bash is a system that you ll find on most unix machines and  thankfully  some windows and every Mac out there   At first blush  it s no more than a command-line interface  and therefore off the radar of most users who see such things as an anachronism they d rather forget   I do nearly everything in bash   I READ MY EMAIL FROM A COMMAND LINE  which is why I eschew marked-up email   I navigate directories  edit files  engage in my daily source code checkout and delivery  search for files  search inside files  reboot my machine  and even occasionally browse web pages from the command line  bash is the heart and soul of my digital existence   The trouble is that I tend to have about 6 bash windows open at a time   At work today  I had one running a web server  another fiddling with my database  a third  fourth  and fifth editing different files  while a sixth was grinding away through my machine trying to record the names of every file on the system  Why   Because it s handy to be able to search through such an archive if you want to know where to find an object by filename   When you do this  you end up with lots of windows in your control bar named simply   bash    This is fine if you only have one of them  but its agony when you have 6 or more     and two dozen other things going on   I have three monitors under the simultaneous command of one keyboard mouse pair and I still feel the need for more   Each of those windows has several bash terminals open   So I ve plunked this together   First  place these lines in your  bash profile     export PROMPT COMMAND  export TRIM    bin trim pl     export PS1     e 0   TRIM a    TRIM gt      trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   I went through and wrote dozens of paragraphs on how this all works and exactly why it is set up the way it is  but you re not really interested   Trust me   There is an entire chapter of a book in why I did  CMD      echo     on that third line   Many people  including bluehost  where my other domain is hosted  are still using and old version of bash with major bugs in how it handles traps  so we re stuck with this   You can remove the CMD and replace it with  BASH COMMAND if you are current on your bash version and feel like doing the research   Anyway  the first script I use is here   It creates a nice prompt that contains your machine name and directory  chopped down to a reasonable length                                      trim pl                 usr bin perl     It seems that my cygwin box doesn t have HOSTNAME available in the     environment - at least not to scripts - so I m getting it elsewhere    open  IN    usr bin hostname        hostname    lt IN gt     close  IN      hostname        A-Za-z0-9-         host short    1      preamble         if  length  ENV  PWD    gt 37       ENV  PWD          1 37         path short    1     print   host short   preamble path short                                                             There s a warning at the top of this blog post that you should read now before you start asking stupid questions like   Why didn t you just use the HOSTNAME environment variable via  ENV    Simple   Because that doesn t work for all the systems I tried it on     Now for the really cool bit   Remember line 3 of the  bash profile addition     trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   It s dumping the trim pl script output in the same container as before  printing to both the command prompt and the window title  but this time it s adding the command that you just typed   This is why you don t want to be doing all of this in your  bashrc  any script you run  on my machine  man is one of them  will trigger this thing on every line   man s output gets seriously garbled by what we re doing here   We re not exactly playing nice with the terminal   To grab the command you just typed  we take the bash s history and dice it up a bit                                      hist pl                usr bin perl  while   lt STDIN gt              line         chomp  line   line        27        print  1                                                           So now  I have a bazillion windows going and they say things like     castro   home ronb blog   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot script server   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot mysql -u ron -p   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot find    gt   C ronb system map   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot vi app views cart html erb   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 protect   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 sync -f   Ron-D630   C perforce depot    From the happy little bar at the bottom of the screen  I can now tell which is which at a moment s glance   And because we ve set PS1  as soon as a command finishes executing  the command name is replaced by just the output of trim pl again   UPDATE  same day     This stuff  the  bash profile entries  laid all kinds of hell on me when I   tried it in my  bashrc   Your  bashrc is executed by non-interactive scripts   whenever you invoke bash as a language   I hit this when I was trying to use   man   All sorts of garbage  the complete text of my  bashrc  plus escape   charecters  showed up at the top of the man page   I would suggest testing   this gem with a quick  man man  invocation at the command line once you get   it all together   I guess it s time for me to pull the custom garbage out of my  bashrc and put   it where it belongs     Incedentally  I found myself typing  man trap  at one point in this process

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A Rakefile in my downloads directory containing tasks that copy files from said directory to their respective media archives on external drives  Given my internet speed and storage capacity  it would take me hours out of every week to just copy across and re-name appropriately every piece of media that is downloaded  completely legally  I might add  by hellanzb   Another very useful task in the same file logs into and scrapes IMDB for episode lists   discographies of all the media I have  and then checks NewzBin for reports that would fill any holes I have   Combined  this means I have to do absolutely nothing  and in exchange  I wake up every morning with more media than I could possibly consume in that day sitting on my external hard drives   Did I mention that this is all entirely above-board and legal  d-   I ll probably merge this all into a sort of command-line media manager player  farming things out to mplayer   and publish it on GitHub when I have the time

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copy con c bat c  cd  cls  Z

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MySQL backup  I made a Windows batch script that would create incremental backups of MySQL databases  create a fresh dump every day and back them up every 10 minutes on a remote server  It saved my ass countless times  especially in the countless situations where a client would call  yelling their head off that a record just  disappeared  from the database  I went  no problem  let s see what happened  because I also wrote a binary search script that would look for the last moment when a record was present in the database  From there it would be pretty easy to understand who  stole  it and why  You wouldn t imagine how useful these have been and I ve been using them for almost 5 years  I wouldn t switch to anything else simply because they ve been roughly tested and they re custom made  meaning they do exactly what I need and nothing more but I ve tweaked them so much that it would be a snap to add extra functionalities  So  my  masterpiece  is a MySQL incremental backup   remote backup   logs search system for Windows  I also wrote a version for Linux but I ve lost it somewhere  probably because it was only about 15 lines   a cron job instead of Windows  about 1 200 lines   two scheduled tasks

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A perl script that scrapes my local Craigslist  by selected categories  in to a SQL DB which I can then query against    V2 of this updates the DB with a timer and alerts me if I have a match on any of the queries  basically providing me with a background agent for CL

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A small task-bar program that extracted every error-code constant out of a third-party JavaDoc and let me lookup the constant-name for a given error code  Plus  add in any conversions from HEX to decimal  etc   This comes up a lot when working in the debugger--you get back the error code  but then tracking back the code to text is a huge pain  It s even more common when working with software that wraps native methods  OS calls  or COM    often times  the constants are copied straight out of an error header file with no additional context  repeated values  and no enumerations

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A similar backup sh for each project  that tars and gzips just the source  moves it into a snapshot directory and labels it with timestamp  project-mmddyy-hhmmss   Useful for coding between commits

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For those of us who don t remember where we are on unix  or which SID we are using   Pop this in your  profile    lt br gt function CD  lt br gt    lt br gt    unalias cd  lt br gt    command cd       amp  amp  PS1     ORACLE SID    hostname   PWD gt     lt br gt    alias cd CD  lt br gt    lt br gt  alias cd CD

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alias dir  ls -al  is my preferred favorite script

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Best real-life script   Me   Enters room    Boss  I want a raise      Boss    Offers chair from behind desk   A raise   Please  take my job    Then again  that may be the worst script

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alias snoot  find     -path     svn   -print0   xargs -0 egrep

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Anime CRC32 checksum      usr bin python                                                                                                                                                                                    import sys  re  zlib  c null     00 00m  c red     31 01m  c green     32 01m   def crc checksum filename       filedata   open filename   rb   read       sum   zlib crc32 filedata      if sum  lt  0          sum  amp   16  8-1     return    8X    sum   for file in sys argv 1        sum   crc checksum file      try          dest sum   re split           file  -2          if sum    dest sum              c in   c green         else              c in   c red         sfile   file split dest sum          print   s s s    s s s s s     c in  sum  c null  sfile 0   c in  dest sum  c null  sfile 1       except IndexError          print   s    s    sum  file

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alias dir  ls -al  is my preferred favorite script

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A script that runs hourly to retrain my spam filters based two IMAP folder where span and ham are put      bin sh FNDIR  train-as-spam  FPDIR  train-as-ham   for dir in  home    maildir do     cd    dir       USER  stat -c  U         SRCDIR    dir     FNDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class spam --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi      SRCDIR    dir     FPDIR       if     -d   SRCDIR     then         echo no    SRCDIR   directory     else         cd    SRCDIR  cur          ls -tr   while read file         do             if grep -q   X-DSPAM     file    then                 SOURCE  error              else                 SOURCE  corpus              fi              dspam --user    USER   --class innocent --source    SOURCE   --deliver innocent spam --stdout  lt     file    gt      tmp   file               mv     tmp   file      dir  new   file        amp  amp  rm    file           done     fi  done

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alias snoot  find     -path     svn   -print0   xargs -0 egrep

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On Windows XP  I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C    dir  s  b    gt  dirlist txt   This lists the full path of all files on the C drive  Then whenever I need to find a file  I can use findstr  This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path  For example   findstr   jpg  dirlist txt findstr  i  r  windows  system32  png   dirlist txt   This is a very fast solution to set up  and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection   If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern  first list all of the files you need to check  then search within them  For example  to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this   findstr    java   py  dirlist txt  gt  narrowlist txt findstr  i  r  f narrowlist txt  flip  image

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MySQL backup  I made a Windows batch script that would create incremental backups of MySQL databases  create a fresh dump every day and back them up every 10 minutes on a remote server  It saved my ass countless times  especially in the countless situations where a client would call  yelling their head off that a record just  disappeared  from the database  I went  no problem  let s see what happened  because I also wrote a binary search script that would look for the last moment when a record was present in the database  From there it would be pretty easy to understand who  stole  it and why  You wouldn t imagine how useful these have been and I ve been using them for almost 5 years  I wouldn t switch to anything else simply because they ve been roughly tested and they re custom made  meaning they do exactly what I need and nothing more but I ve tweaked them so much that it would be a snap to add extra functionalities  So  my  masterpiece  is a MySQL incremental backup   remote backup   logs search system for Windows  I also wrote a version for Linux but I ve lost it somewhere  probably because it was only about 15 lines   a cron job instead of Windows  about 1 200 lines   two scheduled tasks

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A threaded HTML scraper to download all available subtitles for series movies from a site which is a pain to use  you have to click like 4 times after a search to get to the download page  just to display more ads   Now I just put the search criteria and press download

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Well an AutoHotkey script that make my life within reach of only a keyboard     often used app  folder  etc  within one win  combination  That often means activating the application if already launched  and else launch the application  double-click  of ctrl to launch Launchy - which leads to a few keypresses from my not so often used apps add a bunch of missing keyboard shortcuts in windows explorer  XP  such as create new folder  toggle hidden file show file extension  Ctrl-Enter to open any file as text file in emacs  open command line window  cmd and cygwin shell  with the current path set  etc  etc  Windows manipulation  move  resize  send to next monitor  max minimize  toggle always on top  change transparency  etc etc  all with just key combinations Misc such as hibernate  eject external drives  google any selected word  in any app where ctrl-c as copy works   shutdown timer  etc  etc  Everything with just one key combination   This keyboard script just make me such a happy-camper  and it is in fact the major reason that I m still using windows instead of linux as my primary platform since autohotkey only works on windows

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I wrote a script for formatting C source files that automatically indents the code using an appropriate combination of tab and space characters  such that the file will appear correct regardless of what the tab setting on your editor is   Source code is here

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Mass file renaming via drag amp drop   Ages ago I ve made a small VBScript that accepts a RegEx and replaces file names accordingly  You would simply drop a bunch of files or folders on it  I found that to be very useful throughout the years   gist github com 15824  Beware  the comments are in German

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My  cmd backup script  It runs on my server every night  and names the backup files according the week day  A full week of backups has saved me  and my family  many times       Backup args        V Verify   yes no        R Restrict access to owner   yes no        RS Removable storage   yes no        HC Hardware compression  on off        M Backup type  normal copy differential incremental daily        L Log file type  f s n        D  Description        J  Job-name        F  File-name   SETLOCAL     ensure that network drives are mounted CALL C  bat configs MapShares-home cmd echo on  set today  DATE  0 3  if  today   Mon set yesterday 0Sunday if  today   Tue set yesterday 1Monday if  today   Wed set yesterday 2Tuesday if  today   Thu set yesterday 3Wednesday if  today   Fri set yesterday 4Thursday if  today   Sat set yesterday 5Friday if  today   Sun set yesterday 6Saturday  set configsDir   dp0 set storePath C  mybackups      eg  Monday C files  set title  yesterday  backup set   echo  DATE   TIME   title      storePath   yesterday  backup log   CALL BackupConfigs bat     Create new BKF file call C  WINDOWS system32 ntbackup exe backup          configsDir  daily bks         V yes  R no  RS no  HC off  M normal  L s        D   title          J   title  job         F   storePath   yesterday  bkf             storePath   yesterday  backup log   echo  DATE   TIME  Completed      storePath   yesterday  backup log   copy   storePath   yesterday  bkf   V  Backups NEPTUNE   CALL C  bat clean-temps bat  defrag -v C      storePath   yesterday  defrag log      display backup directories start  D C  bat Backups   checkbkf bat  ENDLOCAL    pause

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Best real-life script   Me   Enters room    Boss  I want a raise      Boss    Offers chair from behind desk   A raise   Please  take my job    Then again  that may be the worst script

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A perl script that scrapes my local Craigslist  by selected categories  in to a SQL DB which I can then query against    V2 of this updates the DB with a timer and alerts me if I have a match on any of the queries  basically providing me with a background agent for CL

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bin bash   check to see if site is up     if it is  don t worry     if it s down  restart apache after get a process listing     v 1 Warren M Myers - initial stab       31 Aug 06    ERRCOD  7  WHEN  date   d b y  REPT    psaux  WHEN txt  STARS                         curl -I http   www shodor org  gt   var tmp curlret txt  if            ERRCOD     then       return was unable to connect to host  save ps -aux  mail report     ps -aux  gt   REPT     echo  STARS     echo  curl return results      echo     cat curlret txt     echo     echo  STARS     echo  ps -aux results      cat  REPT     echo     echo  STARS     echo  restarting apache       etc init d apache2 restart     echo  apache restarted      echo     echo  ps -aux results saved in  REPT  fi  rm -f  var tmp curlret txt

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A Greasemonkey script which removes obviously stupid    comments from gaming site Kotaku com       As identified by common spelling mistakes  all-caps writing  excessive use of  LOL  and similar heuristics

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A similar backup sh for each project  that tars and gzips just the source  moves it into a snapshot directory and labels it with timestamp  project-mmddyy-hhmmss   Useful for coding between commits

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I ve written a small shell script  tapt  for Debian based system  esp  Ubuntu  What it basically does is to post all your  apt-get  activities to your twitter account  It helps me to keep the track of what and when I ve installed remove programs in my Ubuntu system  I created a new Twitter account just for this and kept it private  Really useful  More information here  http   www quicktweaks com tapt

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A little script that monitors some popular websites for ads that match my skills and email me an email

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I use a DOS program that errors out if it s past a certain date   I just looked at the batch file that it was using to start up and changed it so it would first change the date to 2000  then run the program   On the program s exit  it changed the date back to what it was before it was changed

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This keeps 20 days of diff backups without using a bunch of space  Uses links to copy and rsync copies as necessary      bin bash                                                                                                                                                                                                                               BACKUPDIR  media proxy store backups                                                                                                                                                                                                         -d  BACKUPDIR        echo  BACKUP DIRECTORY NOT AVAILABLE    exit                                                                                                                                                                    dobackup                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        SDIR  2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 PARENTDIR  1                                                                                                                                                                                                                            echo  BACKING UP  PARENTDIR  SDIR to  BACKUPDIR                                                                                                                                                                                         bnum 20         count  bnum           -d   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   bnum         mv   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   bnum   BACKUPDIR   SDIR  tmp            until    count -eq 1    do                 let lastdir  count-1                   -d   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   lastdir        mv   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   lastdir   BACKUPDIR   SDIR   count                    let count- 1         done         cp -al    BACKUPDIR   SDIR  0    BACKUPDIR   SDIR  1         rsync -a --delete --bwlimit 2000   PARENTDIR  SDIR   BACKUPDIR   SDIR  0    for backup in   cat  sbin backup directories   do         PDIR   echo  backup   awk -F        print 1            DIR   echo  backup   awk -F        print 2            dobackup  PDIR  DIR done  exit    cat  sbin backup directories  media warehouse  Archive  media warehouse  concept

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I often use a MS Word macro that takes a source-code file  formats it in two columns of monospaced type on a landscape page  numbers the lines  and adds company header and footer info such as filename  print date  page number  and confidentiality statement   Printing both sides of the page uses about 1 4 the paper as the equivalent lpr command    Does anyone use lpr anymore

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Well back in 2005 I used Gentoo Linux and I used a lot a small program called genlop to show me the history of what I ve emerged  installed  on my gentoo box  Well to simplify my work I ve written not a small python script but a large one  but at that time I just started using python          usr bin python                                                  Gentoo emerge status                     This script requires genlop                   you can install it using  emerge genlop        Milot Shala  lt milot mymyah com gt                                                           import sys import os import time   colors color    color  r     x1b 31 01m  color  g     x1b 32 01m  color  b     x1b 34 01m  color  0     x1b 0m    def r txt      return color  r   txt color  0   def g txt      return color  g   txt color  0   def b txt      return color  b   txt color  0      View Options def view opt           print    print    print g  full-info - View full information for emerged package      print g  cur - View current emerge      print g  hist - View history of emerged packages by day      print g  hist-all - View full list of history of emerged packages      print g  rsync - View rsync history      print g  time - View time for compiling a package      print g  time-unmerged - View time of unmerged packages      print    command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main        if command              c         program      else        c         program      system command  clear  def c       os system  clear       Base program def program       c      print g  Gentoo emerge status script      print   ---------------------------      print     print   1      g   Enter options      print   2      g   View options      print   3      g   Exit      print    command   input     gt          if command    1           print       print r    First of all  you must view options to know what to use  you can enter option name   if you know any   or type  view-opt  to view options            print       time sleep 2        command   raw input b  Option name            if  command     view-opt  or command     VIEW-OPT             view opt           elif command     full-info            c            print g  Full information for a single package            print   -------------------------------------            print          print b  Enter package name            command raw input   gt              c            print g  Full information for package    b command           print   -----------------------------------            print          pack   genlop -i   command           pack      join pack           os system pack            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main             command raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     cur            if command     cur               c               print g  Current emerge session s                print   -------------------------               print             print b  Listing current emerge session s                print             time sleep 1              os system  genlop -c               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if  command                        c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist            if command     hist               c               print g  History of merged packages               print   ---------------------------               print             time sleep 1              print b  Enter number of how many days ago you want to see the packages               command   raw input   gt                 c               print g  Packages merged   b command   g   day s  before                print   ------------------------------------               pkg   genlop --list --date   command   days ago               pkg      join pkg              os system pkg               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program           elif command     hist-all               c               print g  Full history of merged individual packages               print   --------------------------------------               print             print b  Do you want to view individual package                print r  YES NO                command   raw input   gt                 print             if  command     yes  or command     YES                   print g  Enter package name                  command   raw input   gt                    print                pkg   genlop -l   grep   command      less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                  else                    c                     program                elif  command     no  or command     NO                   pkg   genlop -l   less                  pkg      join pkg                 os system pkg                  print                print r  Press Enter to return to main                  command   raw input                  if command                          c                     program                   else                    c                     program                else                 c                  program           elif command     rsync            print g  RSYNC updates            print          print          print          print b  You can view rsynced time by year             print r  Do you want this script to do it for you   yes no             command   raw input   gt              if  command     yes  or command     YES                print             print g  Enter year i e    b  2005               print             command   raw input   gt                 rsync   genlop -r   grep   command     less               rsync      join rsync              os system rsync               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                c               program            elif  command     no  or command     NO                os system  genlop -r   less               print             print r  Press Enter to return to main                command   raw input               if command                       c                  program                else                 c                  program          elif command     time            c            print g  Time of package compilation            print   ---------------------------            print          print           print b  Enter package name            pkg name   raw input   gt              pkg   emerge   pkg name   -p   genlop -p   less            pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program           elif command     time-unmerged            c            print g  Show when package s  is when is unmerged            print   ----------------------------------------            print           print b  Enter package name              name   raw input   gt              pkg   genlop -u   name           pkg      join pkg           os system pkg            print          print r  Press Enter to return to main            time sleep 2           command   raw input            if command                    c               program             else              c               program          else           print          print r  Wrong Selection             time sleep 2           c            program        elif command    2        view opt         command   raw input r  Press Enter to return to main           if command                 c            program         else           c            program        elif command    3        print       print b  Thank you for using this script         print       time sleep 1        sys exit       else        print       print r  Wrong Selection          time sleep 2        c         program         command          program

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A threaded HTML scraper to download all available subtitles for series movies from a site which is a pain to use  you have to click like 4 times after a search to get to the download page  just to display more ads   Now I just put the search criteria and press download

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For those of us who don t remember where we are on unix  or which SID we are using   Pop this in your  profile    lt br gt function CD  lt br gt    lt br gt    unalias cd  lt br gt    command cd       amp  amp  PS1     ORACLE SID    hostname   PWD gt     lt br gt    alias cd CD  lt br gt    lt br gt  alias cd CD

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A simply Python script that converts line endings from Unix to Windows that I stuck in my system32 directory  It s been lost to the ages for a few months  now  but basically it d convert a list of known text-based file types to Windows line endings  and you could specify which files to convert  or all files  for a wildcard list

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Sometimes I forget what are the most recent files I just created in a directory  but a ls command will just show every file in the directory  I just want a few most recent files so I put this in my  cshrc   ls -l -t   awk  NR lt 15 print  0      Actually it is in a file called lt and in the  cshrc it is set with  alias lt    lt    So now lt will show me only a few files

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A threaded HTML scraper to download all available subtitles for series movies from a site which is a pain to use  you have to click like 4 times after a search to get to the download page  just to display more ads   Now I just put the search criteria and press download

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I got a script which extracts id3 tags encodes the songs newly in a certain format  and then adds them according to the tags to my music library   300 lines of python  Mostly because lame isn t able to deal with tags in a nice fashion

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I wrote a file extraction tool to be used in Linux  that can extract about 20 different file formats and uses the file content  not the file name   This tool got quite popular  I have a regular stream of people who download it from my blog  Get it here    E - Extract Any Archive

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I like to store my photos in a directory based on the date the picture was taken  Therefore I wrote a program that would scan a memory card for pictures  create any folders on my hard disk that it needed to based on the dates of the pictures  then copy them in

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I don t have the code any more  but possibly the most useful script I wrote was  believe it or not  in VBA   I had an annoying colleague who had such a short fuse that I referred to him as Cherry Bomb   He would often get mad when customers would call and then stand up and start ranting at me over the cubicle wall  killing my productivity and morale   I always had Microsoft Excel open   When he would do this  I would alt-tab to Excel and there  on the toolbar  was a new icon with an image of a cherry bomb   I would discreetly click that     and nothing would happen   However  shortly after that I would get a phone call and would say something like  yeah  yeah  that sounds bad   I had better take a look    And then I would get up  apologize to the Cherry Bomb and walk away   What happened is that we used NetWare and it had a primitive messaging system built in   When I clicked the button  a small VBA script would send out a NetWare message to my friends  telling them that the Cherry Bomb was at it again and would they please call me   He never figured it out

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Called assignIisSite ToAppPool js  Really useful when you want to make sure that some resources are properly mapped       SetAppPool  W3SVC 1059997624 Root    MyAppPool       function SetAppPool webId  appPoolName    var providerObj GetObject  winmgmts  root MicrosoftIISv2    var vdirObj providerObj get  IIsWebVirtualDirSetting      webId         vdirObj AppPoolId appPoolName  vdirObj Put

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A Quick and Dirty Python script that looked up the DNS for google com every 5 seconds and beeped once if it succeeded and twice if it failed    I wrote this during a time when I had to live with a highly flaky home network  It allowed me to instantly know the state of the network even while I was head first under the desk across the room with both hands full of network cable and a flashlight in my mouth

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I suppose this depends on how you define useful  but my favorite little script is a variant on the  nix fortune program  See below  and you ll get the idea of what it does   telemachus     haiku      January-- in other provinces     plums blooming      Issa   It doesn t really get anything done  but a nice haiku goes a long way   I like how the colorizer decided to interpret the poem    Edit  If I really have to be useful  I d say a script that allows a user to enter a US zipcode and get current weather and 0-3 days of forecast from Google

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Running WinXP and I never seem to have time to kick off a defrag and wait for it to finish  So I wrote my own script to fire off XP s builtin defrag exe and scheduled it to run nitely  The results are saved to a log file in C  Temp for later review    echo off  GOTO  MAIN                                                                  Reason         This script runs the defrag utility       Suggestion        Schedule this script to run daily  via schtasks          Example           SCHTASKS  Create  SC DAILY  ST 03 00 00                     TR   C  path to DAILY DEFRAG BAT   TN  Daily Defrag of C Drive           Example           AT 03 00  every Su M T W Th F Sa C  path to DAILY DEFRAG BAT      Required OS         Windows XP or Windows Server 2003      Required files        DEFRAG EXE                                                                   MAIN        Output a listing of scheduled tasks    SCHTASKS  QUERY  V  gt  C  temp schtasks out                                                                        SITE SPECIFIC Program Parameters                                                                                        Drive to defrag         SET TARGET C           Log file         SET LOGFILE C  temp defrag log                                                                       No editable parameters below this line                                                                               SETLOCAL         Announce intentions    echo     echo Beginning defragmentation of disk  TARGET     echo ----------------------------------------------     echo     for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   date  t   do set NOW   a    for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   time  t   do set NOW  NOW    a    echo  Start time   NOW         Run the defrag utility    C  WINNT SYSTEM32 defrag exe  TARGET  -f -v  gt   LOGFILE      echo     for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   date  t   do set NOW   a    for  f  tokens 1 delims      a in   time  t   do set NOW  NOW    a    echo    End time   NOW      echo     echo ----------------------------------------------    echo Defrag complete      echo     END

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A python script that does a filewalk and prints my directory tree sorted by disk usage

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A Greasemonkey script which removes obviously stupid    comments from gaming site Kotaku com       As identified by common spelling mistakes  all-caps writing  excessive use of  LOL  and similar heuristics

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I had a version control script that would take a directory as an argument  and recursively copy all files to    dirname DATE TIME   Obviously it was a crappy way to do things  but it was handy before installing a real version control package

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For those of us who don t remember where we are on unix  or which SID we are using   Pop this in your  profile    lt br gt function CD  lt br gt    lt br gt    unalias cd  lt br gt    command cd       amp  amp  PS1     ORACLE SID    hostname   PWD gt     lt br gt    alias cd CD  lt br gt    lt br gt  alias cd CD

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I have a Python script that automatically runs when I plug my digital camera in.

It copies all of the pictures off the card on the camera, backs them up, and then uploads them to Flickr.

The upload-to-Flickr piece comes from uploadr.py (which I can't take credit for).

Here's the Python code for unloading the camera. It recurses through SRCDIR and names each image with the date & time before copying the images to DESTDIR.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import string
import time
import shutil

###################################################
__SRCDIR__ = "/mnt/camera"
__DESTDIR__ = "/home/pictures/recent"
###################################################
def cbwalk(arg, dirname, names):
    sdatetime = time.strftime("%y%m%d%H%M")
    for name in names:
        if string.lower(name[-3:]) in ("jpg", "mov"):
            srcfile = "%s/%s" % (dirname, name)
            destfile = "%s/%s_%s" % (__DESTDIR__, sdatetime, name)
                    print destfile
            shutil.copyfile( srcfile, destfile)
###################################################
if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.path.walk(__SRCDIR__, cbwalk, None)

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I have a batch file which runs every morning  which launches a browser with the tabs loaded to all the sites I want to check each day  Woot  Dilbert  Doonesbury  UserFriendly  seasonally  NY Mets scores and electoral-vote com  plus a few websites that need to be visited regularly to keep membership active

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Sometimes I forget what are the most recent files I just created in a directory  but a ls command will just show every file in the directory  I just want a few most recent files so I put this in my  cshrc   ls -l -t   awk  NR lt 15 print  0      Actually it is in a file called lt and in the  cshrc it is set with  alias lt    lt    So now lt will show me only a few files

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A few years ago I wrote a winforms app with the help of a few win32 api s to completely lock myself out of my computer for an hour so that it would force me to go and exercise  Because I was lazy  No    because I had a personal fitness goal  Sometimes you just need a little kick to get started

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I m a private pilot   I wrote a couple of scripts that obtain weather information for local airports from aviationweather gov   They were useful for a quick answer to the question  Is today a good day to fly

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Work Home ps1 and Work Work ps1    modify the hosts file  to go through LAN or WAN addresses

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A Quick and Dirty Python script that looked up the DNS for google com every 5 seconds and beeped once if it succeeded and twice if it failed    I wrote this during a time when I had to live with a highly flaky home network  It allowed me to instantly know the state of the network even while I was head first under the desk across the room with both hands full of network cable and a flashlight in my mouth

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Well an AutoHotkey script that make my life within reach of only a keyboard     often used app  folder  etc  within one win  combination  That often means activating the application if already launched  and else launch the application  double-click  of ctrl to launch Launchy - which leads to a few keypresses from my not so often used apps add a bunch of missing keyboard shortcuts in windows explorer  XP  such as create new folder  toggle hidden file show file extension  Ctrl-Enter to open any file as text file in emacs  open command line window  cmd and cygwin shell  with the current path set  etc  etc  Windows manipulation  move  resize  send to next monitor  max minimize  toggle always on top  change transparency  etc etc  all with just key combinations Misc such as hibernate  eject external drives  google any selected word  in any app where ctrl-c as copy works   shutdown timer  etc  etc  Everything with just one key combination   This keyboard script just make me such a happy-camper  and it is in fact the major reason that I m still using windows instead of linux as my primary platform since autohotkey only works on windows

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A shell script to perform rotating backups using rsync   It also supports executing arbitrary child programs to support other pre-backup activities  downloading delicious bookmarks  for example    http   gist github com 6806

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usr bin perl use strict  use utf8  use Encode  use File  Find  binmode STDOUT    utf8   sub orderly       my   x   y        a   b       if  my  z    x  lt   gt   y   return  z       x   length  a       y   length  b      my  z    x  lt   y    x    y      if  substr  a  0   z  eq substr  b  0   z             return  y  lt   gt   x            else           return  a cmp  b          my  conf   map        gt  0   split      acsxL   sub Stat   conf L    lstat   stat  my  dirs       while  defined       shift         if     eq  --    push  dirs   ARGV  last      elsif    -      s            for  split      1                if   exists  conf     or  conf       1 and  conf a  and  conf s                     print STDERR   0  -a   -c   -s   -x   -L   --      n                   exit 1                                    else  push  dirs        s       s for  dirs        SO has crappy syntax highlighting  dirs   qw    unless  dirs  my  spec    follow   gt   conf L   no chdir   gt  1   if   conf a          spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     elsif   conf s          spec wanted    sub           Stat              dirs 0      -f     -s     0           else        spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1            -d   and pop  a          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     if   conf x          spec preprocess    sub           my  dev    Stat  File  Find  dir  0           grep   dev     Stat   File  Find  dir      0                while   dirs        find   spec   dirs 0  eq             dirs 0                      dirs 0   if  conf c       shift  dirs            lt  1024    1   printf   s    -6 6sB    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    0                lt  1024    2   printf   s    -6 6sK    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    1                lt  1024    3   printf   s    -6 6sM    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    2                lt  1024    4   printf   s    -6 6sG    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    3                lt  1024    5   printf   s    -6 6sT    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    4                lt  1024    6   printf   s    -6 6sP    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    5                lt  1024    7   printf   s    -6 6sE    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    6                lt  1024    8   printf   s    -6 6sZ    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    7                             printf   s    -6 6sY    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    8          for grep          gt  0  sort orderly keys       I save it in   bin dush  it acts as a sort of du -h du   sort -n hybrid  sorts and gives human-readable sizes all at once   Very useful for finding what s taking up disk space   In a similar vein      usr bin perl  t   1   p   map       gt    t    1024   qw K M G T P E Z Y    t   4707319808  if   ARGV        if        shift       - dvd i    t   4707319808      elsif    - cd  w    i    t   737280000      elsif    - cd i    t   681984000      elsif    -    d      kmgtpezy   i    t    1     p   U 2      1       elsif    -    d         t    1      else  unshift  ARGV          q   r   s     0    ENV COLUMNS     80  - 13   t   while   lt  gt         chomp  stat      unless  -e              print STDERR     does not exist n           next            if    s    -s     gt   t             s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n               sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s          printf  ----------- d  s n      q   r   -  x  r           s   -s              printf   8s  s n           sprintf   3 3f      s   100    t              4     r    s        1           s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n       sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s    I save this as   bin fit   When I m archiving a bunch of files  I run ls   fit or ls   fit -cdrw to help determine if it ll fit on a DVD CD CDRW  and where to split them if they don t

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A Quick and Dirty Python script that looked up the DNS for google com every 5 seconds and beeped once if it succeeded and twice if it failed    I wrote this during a time when I had to live with a highly flaky home network  It allowed me to instantly know the state of the network even while I was head first under the desk across the room with both hands full of network cable and a flashlight in my mouth

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I wrote some lines of code to automatically tweak all things powertop suggests when I unplug my laptop and undo that if I plug the laptop back in  Maximum power  maximum efficiency  maximum convenience

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I often use a MS Word macro that takes a source-code file  formats it in two columns of monospaced type on a landscape page  numbers the lines  and adds company header and footer info such as filename  print date  page number  and confidentiality statement   Printing both sides of the page uses about 1 4 the paper as the equivalent lpr command    Does anyone use lpr anymore

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A small task-bar program that extracted every error-code constant out of a third-party JavaDoc and let me lookup the constant-name for a given error code  Plus  add in any conversions from HEX to decimal  etc   This comes up a lot when working in the debugger--you get back the error code  but then tracking back the code to text is a huge pain  It s even more common when working with software that wraps native methods  OS calls  or COM    often times  the constants are copied straight out of an error header file with no additional context  repeated values  and no enumerations

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I have a batch file which runs every morning  which launches a browser with the tabs loaded to all the sites I want to check each day  Woot  Dilbert  Doonesbury  UserFriendly  seasonally  NY Mets scores and electoral-vote com  plus a few websites that need to be visited regularly to keep membership active

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A Greasemonkey script to add a  press that button a lot  control box to an online game

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I wrote some lines of code to automatically tweak all things powertop suggests when I unplug my laptop and undo that if I plug the laptop back in  Maximum power  maximum efficiency  maximum convenience

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The most useful  But there are so many      d cmd contains   dir  ad  on dd cmd contains   dir  a-d  on x cmd contains   exit s cmd contains   start   sx cmd contains   start    amp  exit ts cmd contains the following  which allows me to properly connect to another machine s console session over RDP regardless of whether I m on Vista SP1 or not    echo off  ver   find  6 0 6001    if ERRORLEVEL 0 if not errorlevel 1  set TSCONS admin  ELSE set TSCONS console  echo Issuing command  mstsc   TSCONS   v  1  start mstsc   TSCONS   v  1    Sorry for the weird formatting  apparently you can t have more than one code sample per answer    From a command prompt I ll navigate to where my VS solution file is  and then I ll want to open it  but I m too lazy to type blah sln and press enter  So I wrote sln cmd    echo off if not exist   sln goto csproj for   f in    sln  do start  max   f goto end   csproj for   f in    csproj  do start  max   f goto end   end   So I just type sln and press enter and it opens the solution file  if any  in the current directory  I wrap things like pushd and popd in pd cmd and pop cmd

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This  from a posting in my blog a few months ago  has gone from being an idea that I thought was cool to one of the best little hacks I ve coughed up in recent memory   I quote it in full here                       I spend a lot of time in bash   For the uninitiated  bash is a system that you ll find on most unix machines and  thankfully  some windows and every Mac out there   At first blush  it s no more than a command-line interface  and therefore off the radar of most users who see such things as an anachronism they d rather forget   I do nearly everything in bash   I READ MY EMAIL FROM A COMMAND LINE  which is why I eschew marked-up email   I navigate directories  edit files  engage in my daily source code checkout and delivery  search for files  search inside files  reboot my machine  and even occasionally browse web pages from the command line  bash is the heart and soul of my digital existence   The trouble is that I tend to have about 6 bash windows open at a time   At work today  I had one running a web server  another fiddling with my database  a third  fourth  and fifth editing different files  while a sixth was grinding away through my machine trying to record the names of every file on the system  Why   Because it s handy to be able to search through such an archive if you want to know where to find an object by filename   When you do this  you end up with lots of windows in your control bar named simply   bash    This is fine if you only have one of them  but its agony when you have 6 or more     and two dozen other things going on   I have three monitors under the simultaneous command of one keyboard mouse pair and I still feel the need for more   Each of those windows has several bash terminals open   So I ve plunked this together   First  place these lines in your  bash profile     export PROMPT COMMAND  export TRIM    bin trim pl     export PS1     e 0   TRIM a    TRIM gt      trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   I went through and wrote dozens of paragraphs on how this all works and exactly why it is set up the way it is  but you re not really interested   Trust me   There is an entire chapter of a book in why I did  CMD      echo     on that third line   Many people  including bluehost  where my other domain is hosted  are still using and old version of bash with major bugs in how it handles traps  so we re stuck with this   You can remove the CMD and replace it with  BASH COMMAND if you are current on your bash version and feel like doing the research   Anyway  the first script I use is here   It creates a nice prompt that contains your machine name and directory  chopped down to a reasonable length                                      trim pl                 usr bin perl     It seems that my cygwin box doesn t have HOSTNAME available in the     environment - at least not to scripts - so I m getting it elsewhere    open  IN    usr bin hostname        hostname    lt IN gt     close  IN      hostname        A-Za-z0-9-         host short    1      preamble         if  length  ENV  PWD    gt 37       ENV  PWD          1 37         path short    1     print   host short   preamble path short                                                             There s a warning at the top of this blog post that you should read now before you start asking stupid questions like   Why didn t you just use the HOSTNAME environment variable via  ENV    Simple   Because that doesn t work for all the systems I tried it on     Now for the really cool bit   Remember line 3 of the  bash profile addition     trap  CMD  history   bin hist pl  echo -en   e 0  TRIM gt   CMD 007   DEBUG   It s dumping the trim pl script output in the same container as before  printing to both the command prompt and the window title  but this time it s adding the command that you just typed   This is why you don t want to be doing all of this in your  bashrc  any script you run  on my machine  man is one of them  will trigger this thing on every line   man s output gets seriously garbled by what we re doing here   We re not exactly playing nice with the terminal   To grab the command you just typed  we take the bash s history and dice it up a bit                                      hist pl                usr bin perl  while   lt STDIN gt              line         chomp  line   line        27        print  1                                                           So now  I have a bazillion windows going and they say things like     castro   home ronb blog   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot script server   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot mysql -u ron -p   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot find    gt   C ronb system map   Ron-D630   C ronb rails depot vi app views cart html erb   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 protect   Ron-D630   C perforce depot  p4 sync -f   Ron-D630   C perforce depot    From the happy little bar at the bottom of the screen  I can now tell which is which at a moment s glance   And because we ve set PS1  as soon as a command finishes executing  the command name is replaced by just the output of trim pl again   UPDATE  same day     This stuff  the  bash profile entries  laid all kinds of hell on me when I   tried it in my  bashrc   Your  bashrc is executed by non-interactive scripts   whenever you invoke bash as a language   I hit this when I was trying to use   man   All sorts of garbage  the complete text of my  bashrc  plus escape   charecters  showed up at the top of the man page   I would suggest testing   this gem with a quick  man man  invocation at the command line once you get   it all together   I guess it s time for me to pull the custom garbage out of my  bashrc and put   it where it belongs     Incedentally  I found myself typing  man trap  at one point in this process

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A Greasemonkey script to add a  press that button a lot  control box to an online game

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bin bash   check to see if site is up     if it is  don t worry     if it s down  restart apache after get a process listing     v 1 Warren M Myers - initial stab       31 Aug 06    ERRCOD  7  WHEN  date   d b y  REPT    psaux  WHEN txt  STARS                         curl -I http   www shodor org  gt   var tmp curlret txt  if            ERRCOD     then       return was unable to connect to host  save ps -aux  mail report     ps -aux  gt   REPT     echo  STARS     echo  curl return results      echo     cat curlret txt     echo     echo  STARS     echo  ps -aux results      cat  REPT     echo     echo  STARS     echo  restarting apache       etc init d apache2 restart     echo  apache restarted      echo     echo  ps -aux results saved in  REPT  fi  rm -f  var tmp curlret txt

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Anime CRC32 checksum      usr bin python                                                                                                                                                                                    import sys  re  zlib  c null     00 00m  c red     31 01m  c green     32 01m   def crc checksum filename       filedata   open filename   rb   read       sum   zlib crc32 filedata      if sum  lt  0          sum  amp   16  8-1     return    8X    sum   for file in sys argv 1        sum   crc checksum file      try          dest sum   re split           file  -2          if sum    dest sum              c in   c green         else              c in   c red         sfile   file split dest sum          print   s s s    s s s s s     c in  sum  c null  sfile 0   c in  dest sum  c null  sfile 1       except IndexError          print   s    s    sum  file

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On Windows XP  I have set an AT job to run this command daily in C    dir  s  b    gt  dirlist txt   This lists the full path of all files on the C drive  Then whenever I need to find a file  I can use findstr  This beats using Windows Explorer Search since it allows regular expression matching on the entire path  For example   findstr   jpg  dirlist txt findstr  i  r  windows  system32  png   dirlist txt   This is a very fast solution to set up  and great if you find yourself with a fresh Windows install and no internet connection   If you need to search within certain file types for some pattern  first list all of the files you need to check  then search within them  For example  to find a Java or Python program that flips an image you could do this   findstr    java   py  dirlist txt  gt  narrowlist txt findstr  i  r  f narrowlist txt  flip  image

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usr bin perl use strict  use utf8  use Encode  use File  Find  binmode STDOUT    utf8   sub orderly       my   x   y        a   b       if  my  z    x  lt   gt   y   return  z       x   length  a       y   length  b      my  z    x  lt   y    x    y      if  substr  a  0   z  eq substr  b  0   z             return  y  lt   gt   x            else           return  a cmp  b          my  conf   map        gt  0   split      acsxL   sub Stat   conf L    lstat   stat  my  dirs       while  defined       shift         if     eq  --    push  dirs   ARGV  last      elsif    -      s            for  split      1                if   exists  conf     or  conf       1 and  conf a  and  conf s                     print STDERR   0  -a   -c   -s   -x   -L   --      n                   exit 1                                    else  push  dirs        s       s for  dirs        SO has crappy syntax highlighting  dirs   qw    unless  dirs  my  spec    follow   gt   conf L   no chdir   gt  1   if   conf a          spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     elsif   conf s          spec wanted    sub           Stat              dirs 0      -f     -s     0           else        spec wanted    sub           Stat          my  s   -f     -s     0          decode utf8   gt   File  Find  name        Q dirs 0  E         s          my  a   split        1            -d   and pop  a          for  unshift  a   dirs 0    a  pop  a                   join       a      s                     if   conf x          spec preprocess    sub           my  dev    Stat  File  Find  dir  0           grep   dev     Stat   File  Find  dir      0                while   dirs        find   spec   dirs 0  eq             dirs 0                      dirs 0   if  conf c       shift  dirs            lt  1024    1   printf   s    -6 6sB    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    0                lt  1024    2   printf   s    -6 6sK    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    1                lt  1024    3   printf   s    -6 6sM    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    2                lt  1024    4   printf   s    -6 6sG    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    3                lt  1024    5   printf   s    -6 6sT    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    4                lt  1024    6   printf   s    -6 6sP    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    5                lt  1024    7   printf   s    -6 6sE    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    6                lt  1024    8   printf   s    -6 6sZ    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    7                             printf   s    -6 6sY    s n           sprintf   6 6f              1024    8          for grep          gt  0  sort orderly keys       I save it in   bin dush  it acts as a sort of du -h du   sort -n hybrid  sorts and gives human-readable sizes all at once   Very useful for finding what s taking up disk space   In a similar vein      usr bin perl  t   1   p   map       gt    t    1024   qw K M G T P E Z Y    t   4707319808  if   ARGV        if        shift       - dvd i    t   4707319808      elsif    - cd  w    i    t   737280000      elsif    - cd i    t   681984000      elsif    -    d      kmgtpezy   i    t    1     p   U 2      1       elsif    -    d         t    1      else  unshift  ARGV          q   r   s     0    ENV COLUMNS     80  - 13   t   while   lt  gt         chomp  stat      unless  -e              print STDERR     does not exist n           next            if    s    -s     gt   t             s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n               sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s          printf  ----------- d  s n      q   r   -  x  r           s   -s              printf   8s  s n           sprintf   3 3f      s   100    t              4     r    s        1           s  amp  amp   s  lt   t  amp  amp  printf  - 7s  s n       sprintf   2 3f     100     t -  s     t    t -  s    I save this as   bin fit   When I m archiving a bunch of files  I run ls   fit or ls   fit -cdrw to help determine if it ll fit on a DVD CD CDRW  and where to split them if they don t

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I wrote a cron job to grab the ip address of my dads router and ftp it to a secure location so when he needed help I could remote desktop in and fix his comp

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The most useful  But there are so many      d cmd contains   dir  ad  on dd cmd contains   dir  a-d  on x cmd contains   exit s cmd contains   start   sx cmd contains   start    amp  exit ts cmd contains the following  which allows me to properly connect to another machine s console session over RDP regardless of whether I m on Vista SP1 or not    echo off  ver   find  6 0 6001    if ERRORLEVEL 0 if not errorlevel 1  set TSCONS admin  ELSE set TSCONS console  echo Issuing command  mstsc   TSCONS   v  1  start mstsc   TSCONS   v  1    Sorry for the weird formatting  apparently you can t have more than one code sample per answer    From a command prompt I ll navigate to where my VS solution file is  and then I ll want to open it  but I m too lazy to type blah sln and press enter  So I wrote sln cmd    echo off if not exist   sln goto csproj for   f in    sln  do start  max   f goto end   csproj for   f in    csproj  do start  max   f goto end   end   So I just type sln and press enter and it opens the solution file  if any  in the current directory  I wrap things like pushd and popd in pd cmd and pop cmd

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A Rakefile in my downloads directory containing tasks that copy files from said directory to their respective media archives on external drives  Given my internet speed and storage capacity  it would take me hours out of every week to just copy across and re-name appropriately every piece of media that is downloaded  completely legally  I might add  by hellanzb   Another very useful task in the same file logs into and scrapes IMDB for episode lists   discographies of all the media I have  and then checks NewzBin for reports that would fill any holes I have   Combined  this means I have to do absolutely nothing  and in exchange  I wake up every morning with more media than I could possibly consume in that day sitting on my external hard drives   Did I mention that this is all entirely above-board and legal  d-   I ll probably merge this all into a sort of command-line media manager player  farming things out to mplayer   and publish it on GitHub when I have the time

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A Rakefile in my downloads directory containing tasks that copy files from said directory to their respective media archives on external drives  Given my internet speed and storage capacity  it would take me hours out of every week to just copy across and re-name appropriately every piece of media that is downloaded  completely legally  I might add  by hellanzb   Another very useful task in the same file logs into and scrapes IMDB for episode lists   discographies of all the media I have  and then checks NewzBin for reports that would fill any holes I have   Combined  this means I have to do absolutely nothing  and in exchange  I wake up every morning with more media than I could possibly consume in that day sitting on my external hard drives   Did I mention that this is all entirely above-board and legal  d-   I ll probably merge this all into a sort of command-line media manager player  farming things out to mplayer   and publish it on GitHub when I have the time

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A threaded HTML scraper to download all available subtitles for series movies from a site which is a pain to use  you have to click like 4 times after a search to get to the download page  just to display more ads   Now I just put the search criteria and press download

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My  cmd backup script  It runs on my server every night  and names the backup files according the week day  A full week of backups has saved me  and my family  many times       Backup args        V Verify   yes no        R Restrict access to owner   yes no        RS Removable storage   yes no        HC Hardware compression  on off        M Backup type  normal copy differential incremental daily        L Log file type  f s n        D  Description        J  Job-name        F  File-name   SETLOCAL     ensure that network drives are mounted CALL C  bat configs MapShares-home cmd echo on  set today  DATE  0 3  if  today   Mon set yesterday 0Sunday if  today   Tue set yesterday 1Monday if  today   Wed set yesterday 2Tuesday if  today   Thu set yesterday 3Wednesday if  today   Fri set yesterday 4Thursday if  today   Sat set yesterday 5Friday if  today   Sun set yesterday 6Saturday  set configsDir   dp0 set storePath C  mybackups      eg  Monday C files  set title  yesterday  backup set   echo  DATE   TIME   title      storePath   yesterday  backup log   CALL BackupConfigs bat     Create new BKF file call C  WINDOWS system32 ntbackup exe backup          configsDir  daily bks         V yes  R no  RS no  HC off  M normal  L s        D   title          J   title  job         F   storePath   yesterday  bkf             storePath   yesterday  backup log   echo  DATE   TIME  Completed      storePath   yesterday  backup log   copy   storePath   yesterday  bkf   V  Backups NEPTUNE   CALL C  bat clean-temps bat  defrag -v C      storePath   yesterday  defrag log      display backup directories start  D C  bat Backups   checkbkf bat  ENDLOCAL    pause

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A small application that left click  or double-click  every  X  ms for  Y  amount of time  No more need for that drinking bird to work at the nuclear power plant

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At some point in the distant past I decided to put all the files for my web host s public html directory into a subversion repository   Then I wrote a script which    Creates  mounts  and formats a RAM disk  Exports the trunk of the repository into the RAM disk  Calls rsync to upload any changed files from the RAM disk to my hosting provider  I use a public private key pair to save me from typing my login information each time  Unmounts the RAM disk    Thus  pushing updates from the repository to the server is literally a  one touch  operation   What is most satisfying about the script is that  initially  it was more of a shell scripting exercise than a Grand Project  However  it has probably saved me countless hours of work and makes the prospect of updating a website almost stress-free  maybe more than any other piece of software on my computer

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I like to store my photos in a directory based on the date the picture was taken  Therefore I wrote a program that would scan a memory card for pictures  create any folders on my hard disk that it needed to based on the dates of the pictures  then copy them in

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I wrote a Python script that would go to all the web comics I read  and download any new comics  I just run that once a day  and there is no need to visit each site individually  just visit the  Comics  Folder

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VBS script to create a YYYY YYYY-MM YYYY-MM-DD file structure in my photos folder and move photos from my camera to the appropriate folder

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I wrote a simple Ruby script to help my wife and I when we were considering names for our first child  It generated all name combinations and checked the initials against a blacklist of initials I wanted to avoid  excluding any that didn t match my criteria  It felt like an appropriate thing for a nerdy dad to do and actually proved to be quite worthwhile and useful   Other than that I ve written a couple of Python scripts that serve as IRC bots which I use every day  One saves URLs  via regular expression matching  to delicious  Another serves as a simple IRC Twitter interface  allowing me to check my feed and post updates

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Not every day  but I did use XSLT script to create my wedding invitations  a Pages file for the inserts to the invite cards  and an HTML file for the address labels

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I often use a MS Word macro that takes a source-code file  formats it in two columns of monospaced type on a landscape page  numbers the lines  and adds company header and footer info such as filename  print date  page number  and confidentiality statement   Printing both sides of the page uses about 1 4 the paper as the equivalent lpr command    Does anyone use lpr anymore

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Various Shortcuts to  net start  and  net stop  commands so I can start and stop services without having to go into the Services MMC

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I wrote a script for formatting C source files that automatically indents the code using an appropriate combination of tab and space characters  such that the file will appear correct regardless of what the tab setting on your editor is   Source code is here

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I used to work at a technology summer camp  and we had to compose these write-ups for each of the kids in the group at the end of the week  which they would then receive and take home as a keepsake   Usually  these consisted of a bunch of generic sentences  and one to two personalized sentences   I wrote a python script which constructed one of these write-ups out of a bank of canned sentences  and allowed the user to add a couple of personalized sentences in the middle   This saved a huge amount of time for me and other counselors I let in on the secret   Even though so much of it was automated  our write-ups still looked better than many of the  honest  ones  because we could put more time into the personalized parts

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I wrote a script for formatting C source files that automatically indents the code using an appropriate combination of tab and space characters  such that the file will appear correct regardless of what the tab setting on your editor is   Source code is here

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A python script that does a filewalk and prints my directory tree sorted by disk usage

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A Greasemonkey script to add a  press that button a lot  control box to an online game

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I ve written a small shell script  tapt  for Debian based system  esp  Ubuntu  What it basically does is to post all your  apt-get  activities to your twitter account  It helps me to keep the track of what and when I ve installed remove programs in my Ubuntu system  I created a new Twitter account just for this and kept it private  Really useful  More information here  http   www quicktweaks com tapt

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