Fix typescript files generated with script command

Generally quite a lot of us would have used the script command. This generates the logs for the session. But the problem with the logs is that it contains a lot of un-readable characters. These characters are mostly from the color codes, and as such can be removed very easily with a single command:

cat typescript | 
 perl -pe 's/e([^[]]|[.*.*?[a-zA-Z]|].*?a)//g' | col -b > typescript-processed

This assumes the input log file is named as typescript and the output is kept as typescript-processed. You can change the names as required.

LibreOffice – Formulae Auditing

If you have a excel sheet with lot of formula’s and you are trying to audit them, then a simple solution is to press “ctrl+`” (i.e. control key with back tick). This will put the excel sheet in Formula auditing mode and hence all the cells will show the formula rather than the values which will make it easier to audit them. Hope that helps.

Related articles

• Tips about Excel

cksum – compare for multiple files.

If you have to compare cksum for couple of files, the you know how cumbersome it is. So, I wrote a simple script, wherein you can create a file called cksums in the current directory and copy paste the result of  “**cksums ***”  into this file, and then run this script. Cool 🙂

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: checkcksums.sh
#
#         USAGE: ./checkcksums.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION: Compare cksums of multiple files.
#
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (),
#  ORGANIZATION:
#       CREATED: 02/22/2013 09:12:17 PM IST
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

file=cksums
while read line
do
    a=( $(echo $line) )
    if [[ -f ${a[2]} ]]
    then
        b=( $(cksum ${a[2]}) )
        if [[ $a == $b ]]
        then
            echo "Cksum for ${a[2]} = ${a[0]} matches"
        else
            echo "Failed ::Cksum for ${a[2]} = ${a[0]} matches"
        fi
    else
        echo "Failed :: file ${a[2]} does not exist"
    fi
done < $file

Related articles

• pycksum 0.4.0
• Checking if files are different using cmp
• Alternative to MD5 hash?

dnsmasq not starting from NetworkManager with SELinux enabled.

Some time back I posted on dnsmasq starting from Network Manager and how to setup dnsmasq.

Now, couple of days back , I setup dnsmasq in NetworkManager but was astonished to see that there was no dnsmasq running. I checked with dig and saw that there was no response from localhost for dns queries. Checked “ps -eaf|grep dns” and found that there was no dnsmasq running. I knew that once you mention “dns=dnsmasq” in the NetworkManager then it should start up but that was not happening. And then I checked audit log, found that some permissions were denied by SELinux.

ssh reverse tunning..

If you want to access some local resources like the release website from the remote server when you are connecting to the remoter server using ssh over VPN, then possibly reverse ssh tunnelling is the best option. So, basically when you are connecting to the remote server, you tell the server your intent to do so and which local resource you want to connect to and on which port.So, here I want to connnet to google.com and tunnel the data to 192.168.131.921:9090 tthough the tunnel, then the command to use will be  ::

dnsmasq – use with Network Manager.

Well if you have not heard about dnsmasq:

Dnsmasq is lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server.
It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network.
It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global
DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines
with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured
either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports
static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless
machines.

Continue reading

Music players on Linux – the poor mans random song player.

If you have more applications running on your system then your system can handle them then you know what I mean when I say that the Music Players take a lot of CPU. Otherwise harmless, but when you are doing too many things, then lot of times you would feel that probably stopping the Music player might help. But then Linux is all about alternatives. So, there is a command line player called mpg123, which does not use so much CPU. But what about playlist 🙂