Category: unix_utilities

the “less” utility and UTF-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_(Unix) http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/faq.html#intl https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/263959/how-can-i-paginate-a-utf-8-file-and-see-the-right-characters https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/less.1.html#NATIONAL_CHARACTER_SETS

csvkit: in2csv: the Excel killer

https://csvkit.readthedocs.io https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/1_getting_started.html#in2csv-the-excel-killer in2csv can certainly deal with .xls and .xlsx Excel files for .xlsx files it can: list the names of all sheet names parameterised to extract the specified sheet

Unix …: “exa” – a modern replacement for “ls”

https://the.exa.website/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exa_(command-line_utility) pros: … (lots, that’s why I started installing and using it all around me) cons: I can easily ignore backup files ending in a ~ (AKA “tilde”), but if I do want to see them, that’s difficult – “ls –ignore-backups” ignores backup files, if run on a directory, but it shows them, when… Continue reading Unix …: “exa” – a modern replacement for “ls”

how can I read a file from last line to first line on the Unix command line?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48721344/how-can-i-read-a-file-from-last-line-to-first-line-in-shell https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tac.1.html – cat vs tac $ perl -e ‘print reverse <>’ Input_file There are also solutions in awk and sed – read the stackoverflow article for those solutions!

getent – “get entries from administrative database”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getent https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/manpages/getent.1.en.html The getent command displays entries from databases supported by the Name Service Switch libraries, which are configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf. If one or more key arguments are provided, then only the entries that match the supplied keys will be displayed. Otherwise, if no key is provided, all entries will be displayed (unless the database does not support enumeration). My DS713+ (Intel… Continue reading getent – “get entries from administrative database”

PSmisc – small utilities that use the /proc filesystem

http://psmisc.sourceforge.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pstree I failed compiling the PSmisc package on OS X 10.10 AKA Yosemite. Maybe I wasn’t patient enough. If I had a running Fink system these days, I wouldn’t even bother installing PSmisc resp. pstree myself. But my Fink system broke little after upgrading to Yosemite.