Backscratcher

"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

• Eric Raymond

This is a collection of small programs I have developed over the years to take care of various tasks on the computer. Perhaps the one I use most is 'tps' (turbo-ps), which lets me grep the output of ps with strings rather than pids.

Another one I use a lot is fx (effects). It can do a number of tricks to issue a command on each of a collection of files, even commands that ordinarily only operate on a single file.

align.py
    Read a sequence of text lines and align their contents into
    columns.

ascii.py
    Display the ASCII collating sequence.

calc.py
    Simple calculator/expression evaluator.

chron.py
    Timer. Can count up (like a stopwatch) or down (like a kitchen
    timer).

clps.py
    Command Line Password Safe. Stores (host, user, password)
    tuples in an encrypted file, can copy a password to the
    clipboard for pasting into a password prompt without
    displaying it on the screen. Mac-specific, since it uses
    pbcopy and pbpaste.

dt.py
    Easy date arithmetic.

errno
    Feed it a number from errno.h, get back the symbolic name and
    meaning, or vice versa.

fab.py
    Poor man's make.

filter.py

fl.py
    File manipulations. Copy atime to mtime, mtime to atime; diff file
    against previous revision; revert file to previous revision; remove
    \r from a file (or add them); display all times associated with a
    file; make backup copy of a file; find unreadable files.

fx.py
    Command line effects. Turbo xargs; structured batch renames; etc.

hd.py
    Hexdump.

list.py (list.pl)
    Set arithmetic applied to lists generated by Unix commands.

mag.py (magnitude)
    2384192384283 -> 2.17 Tb

mcal
    Display analog calendar in various formats.

msh
    Start ssh with a control socket so that multiple sessions can
    piggyback over the same connection without repeated
    authentication.

odx.py (odx.pl)
    Report the octal, decimal, and hexadecimal variants of a
    number.

plwhich
    Which for the perl installation. eg., where does Data::Dumper live?

ptidy
    Cleanup up emacs debris.

pytool.py
    Generate python templates.

replay.py (replay.pl)
    Run a command over and over and watch its output.

rxlab
    Play with regular expressions.

scanpath
    Where in my $PATH is foo?

summarize.pl
    Apply "artificial ignorance" to a set of files.

testhelp.py [deprecated -- remove]
    Testing utility routines.

toolframe.py [deprecated -- remove]
    Easy launching for tool-style and simply python programs.

tpbtools.py
    Utility routines.

tps
    Turbo-ps -- find processes.

truth_table
    Generate truth tables for an arbitrary number of variables.

vipath
    Edit $PATH.

wcal
    Wide cal. Three months side by side.

workrpt.py
    Read my work log and generate a report.

wxfr
    Bulk file transfer.

xclean
    Remove emacs backup files (*~) and other debris left behind by work
    processes

You may notice that some of these are written in only perl while others have a python version and some are only in python. I learned perl first and used it alongside the tcl-based expect tool until I discovered python and realized that it provides pretty much everything perl and expect do in a single tool. I'm not a performance wonk, I just want to get the job done, so I didn't worry too much about whether python is as fast or efficient as perl. I just jumped in.

So now I'm in the middle of converting all these programs to python.

Even more recently, I have started using Perl::Expect. So now I know that perl can do expect-type stuff, too.

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Regression tests now live in directory test.