1998-01: After switching from MS-DOS to Linux, I stopped writing C-programs to make Dos more Unix-like and began writing shell scripts to make Linux more Dos-like:-) Actually my only script of that sort, rename, goes well beyond the simple-minded globbing the Dos rename can do. My first Linux, an early version of Red Hat Linux, had no rename command so I wrote one. [Linux has had a rename since circa 1999, in the util-linux package, that's almost identical to mine, however I still prefer mine.]
Here are some general-purpose shell (bash) scripts, written between 1998 and the present:
| rename | -- systematically rename multiple files according to a specified pattern |
| chg | -- systematically revise files according to a specified pattern (or filter) |
| chgsed | -- my usual way of invoking chg |
| chgtr | -- another way of invoking chg |
| unchg | -- undo chg |
| arr | -- filter to re-arrange columns of a file |
| bc | -- an extended bc for floating-point arithmetic in bash-scripts |
| bcf | -- bc with formatted output |
| list | -- an unambiguous textfile-viewer that displays non-ASCII characters in hexadecimal, using less |
| scalepix | -- image scaling and annotating, for webpage-making, preparing a set of photos for emailing, etc (any image type) |
| annotatepix | -- needed by scalepix, mk-calendar-covers; annotates a photo (only for PPM images) |
| url-decode | -- does URL-decoding (percent-decoding) |
| fullname | -- displays fully-qualified filename |
| fullnameNOSLASH | -- reversibly converts pathname to filename |
| fullnameRESLASH | -- the inverse of fullnameNOSLASH |
| datecvt | -- converts alphabetic to numeric month etc |
| dateplusdays | -- for arithmetic with dates |
| dateplusmonths | -- for arithmetic with dates |
| datecvt-from-Apache | -- date conversion from Apache-Logrecord-format |
| dateERW | -- date command that changes days at 8am rather than midnight |
| SetIntersection | -- set-intersection |
| SetSubtract | -- set-difference |
| SetUnion | -- set-union |
| nl2sp | -- convert from one-per-line to space-separated form |
| sp2nl | -- convert from space-separated to one-per-line form |
| SubsetOrEqual | -- returns TRUE iff FILE1 is leading-subset-of-or-equal-to FILE2 |
| NEWER | -- like bash -nt except it correctly handles comparand being a directory |
| OLDER | -- like bash -ot except it correctly handles comparand being a directory |
| clean | -- discards "noise" files like tmp* *~ etc |
| tolower | -- filter to lowercase a string |
| todosfile | -- filter to convert NL-->CR+LF |
| find-dirs | -- uses find to enumerate subdirectories |
| dif | -- an extended variant of Unix-diff, with filtering extensions and terse-output option |
| difsed | -- a frequently used way to invoke dif |
| ATTRIBS | -- displays attributes of an image-file |
| counted-uniquify | -- filter to uniqify-with-count |
| counted-uniquify-ordered | -- filter to uniqify-with-count then order-by-count |
| cvt-utf8-to-latin1 | -- convert textfile from utf8 to latin1 charset |
| cvt-latin1-to-utf8 | -- convert textfile from latin1 to utf8 charset |
Incidentally I avoid filenames containing spaces, and some of my scripts may not behave as desired on such names; however, my rename script does handle them and one of its important uses is to correct them when people send files so named.
Disclaimer: some of these were written before I knew bash well enough to attempt such things:-)
An Easier Way to Install all of the above:
ertools.zip -- zipfile containing all of the above general-purpose scripts, the webmaster-tools, and the other scripts I've published on this site. (Where scripts includes Bash-scripts, Perl scripts, Python scripts, even "bc" scripts, ie: anything that's handled with a "shebang"-line.) See README.htm for more info on this collection of tools, and how to install them. And see Unix-tools for Windows to install for Windows.