Tiny Applications Collection
Tiny Applications Collection is a set of small programs, shell scripts
and other things which may be useful in everyday life of system
administrators, users and programmers. They can be also used as a
base for a more specialised application as they are all Open Source.
If you have written utility which may be useful for others and want to
share it please email me at mina86/AT/mina86.com, I'll be glad to add
your utility to the collection.
At the moment the collection includes:
* add - adds specified text to each line from stdin;
* ai-pitr.pl - it's a joke really. A 6 line long AI which might be
written by Pitr from UserFriendly. For more see:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990602 ;
* ai-sid.pl - it's a joke as well. An 8 line long AI which might by
written by Sid from UserFriendly. Fore more see:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001014 ;
* arpping - tool which pings device with given IP using ARP protocol.
It may be used without IP address assigned to our machine,
ie. priori to calling DHCP client or such.
* changelog.pl - application providing global change log for
administrators to fill and users to read. For instance, can be
used in /etc/profile to show all news;
* cdiff (C and sed versions) - adds ANSI codes to the output of diff
making it a bit more readable.
* check.sh - performs a defined checking (whether www.googl.com
responds to pings by default) and runs specified command if failed.
May be used to automatically shut down PC when connection is lost,
try to reconnect, monitor a server machine and send message to it's
admin if it's down, keep given application running and many more;
* checkmail - checks whether mboxes given as arguments contain any
urnead mail;
* cpuload.sh - tiny script showing the CPU load. May be useful for
people interested in how it is calculated (see also load and
traf.sh);
* cutcom - removes C++ comments from stdin and outputs the result to
stdout;
* drun - it's really 'null' with aditional ability to daemonize
(hence the name). Helpful when running X applications from
a terminal.
* extractlinks.pl - extracts links from a HTML page. Useful, for
example, when downloading an Internet gallery;
* FvwmTransFocus - an FVWM module which changes windows' opacity
depending on focus. When window looses focus it becomes more
transparent which looks "neet";
* genpass.sh - generates a random 64-character long password;
* get_mks_vir_bases - downlaods MKS-Vir virus database. Simplified
version of mksupdate shell script (from mks_vir antivirus). It
does only download up-to-date virus bases and nothing more;
* getlyrics.pl - downloads lyrics of a given song from the Internet
(http://www.lyrc.com.ar/ actually);
* gz2bz - a shell script using gzip and bzip2 to convert gzip
compressed files to bzip2 compressed files.
* infinite-logger - loggs every logged message including the messages
logget by itself :]
* inplace - a shell script which runs given commmand for all given
files and replace their content with whatever the command returns;
* installkernel - pretty complex script for installing the Linux
kernel. It makes a lot of aspects of upgrading the kernel
automatic. The first versions required bash to run but the now, it
is believed to run on any POSIX compatible platform so it can be
run even on small embeded systems;
* ivona.sh - uses IVONA speach synthetiser to say given text. Script
uses demo available at http://www.ivo.pl/ so it requires an
Interent conection to work unless it has all required MP3s cached.
IVONA is a Polish synthesiser so the script is rather useful for
Poles though it may be used as a base for some English synthesiser.
* lesspipe - an input processor for less pager which automatically
decompresses compressed files, list contents of archives, list
contents of a directory, download file from the Internet and many
more.
* load - shows CPU load, memory and net traffic statistics. It's
mostly ment for people who are curious how to callculate such
statistics and use some code from the file in their programs (see
also cpuload.sh and traf.sh);
* malloc - a small program which allocates memory. Sounds stupid?
Mayby, but in theory it can help freeing RAM and therefore speeding
up the machine;
* mountiso - a simple mount/umount wrapper for mounting/unmounting
ISO images or any other files using loop option. You have to be
root to use '-o loop' so if you want to mount an ISO image you have
to login as root. This utility should be SUIDed and then anyoune
can use it to mount ISO images. By default it is not included when
installing tinyapps using 'make install' or creating package - you
need to install it by yourself.
* moz2elinks.pl - converts bookmarks from Mozilla's to ELinks'
(http://elinks.or.cz) format;
* mp3rip - a command line utility for ripping tracks from CD Audio.
It uses cdparanoia to rip the tracks and lame to encode them to
MP3s.
* mpd-show - tool meant to display song currently played in MPD. It
displays it in a terminal in one line with background indicating
the progress. It requires libmpdclient.h and libmpdclient.c files
to compile;
* mpd-state - a program based on Avuton Olrich's state-utils for
saving and restoring MPD (Music Player Daemon) state. It requires
libmpdclient.h and libmpdclient.c files to compile;
* mpd-state-wrapper.sh - a small shell script making mpd-state
behaving like Avuton Olrich's state-utils.
* null - a C program (null.c) and a shell script (null.sh) which
discard standard input. It is meant for people who thnik that
'>/dev/null' is too long to type every time. :) It may also be run
with arguments and the given program will be run and both stdout
and stderr will be redirected to /dev/null;
* one-time-pass.sh - another joke. It works like passwd with this
difference that it automatically generates a random password which
is not revealed to the user, therefore he doesn't know his own
password;
* pingrange.pl - pings a range of addresses;
* quotes.txt - a collection of quotations (some are in Polish);
* rand-files.pl - chooses a random set of files, where each file may
have its own rank or probability, read from standard input such
that their size is no greater then given limit. Useful for
choosing random set of songs to copy to our portable player.
* rot13 - performs an ROT13 'encryption' on stdin;
* settitle - sets the title of xterm, rxvt, Eterm, aterm and other
xterm-compatible terminals;
* show - shows colourised (if ccza is available) log file with
possible option of searching for a pattern. Small but handy - you
don't have to write `less /var/log/syslog` anymore and get ugly
black and white log;
* SlackBuild.gen - generates a SlackBuild template. It was not
really debugged yet but I believe that it'll work quit good;
* splitlines.sh - Splits input, line-by-line, into several files so
that the 1st line goes to the 1st file, the 2nd to the 2nd file and
so on till it wraps and n+1st line goes to 1st file. I use it when
I want to download a lot of small files using a few instances of
wget - it's enough to split file with urls to 2 or 3 files and run
2/3 instances of wget in the background.
* the-book-of-mozilla.txt - a collection of quotations from The Book
of Mozilla (most are unofficial);
* timer - a text-mode timer counting with accuracy to 0.01 s;
* tpwd - truncates PWD to specified number of characters. May be
used in PS1 to display only the end of the PWD instead of a full
60-character long PWD which doesn't really look nice;
* traf.sh - tiny script showing traffic statistics. Many things are
hardcoded in the source but it may be useful for future
modifications or to learn how traffic is calculated (see also
cpuload.sh and load);
* tuptime - my personal favourite :) Displays total (sum of all
uptimes) and biggest uptime. Might be used as replacement to
standard uptime utility;
* tv - Perl script showing TV programme. It gets data from tv.o2.pl
so it's usable for Poles mostly but in the future it is planned to
provide plugins allowing to download data from other sites.
* virtman.sh - adds virtual hosts to Apache configuration for given
user. May be added to some kind of adduser script for automagical
addition of virtual hosts.
* xcolor2rgb - reads from argument list (or from stdin, if no
arguments are given) and prints appropriate RGB value to stdout.
* xgetclass - prints window's application name and class as returned
by XGetClassHint. May be used in some kind of shell scripts but
honestly I just wrote it to test XGetClassHint function and since
I did it I decided to include it in tinyapps. :)
More documentation about each utility is usually provided in the
source code.
