Easier Reinstalls

<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/easier-reinstalls">E<a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/easier-reinstalls">asier Reinstalls

Easier Reinstalls

I typically reinstall my computer operating system every six months. The reasons for this are that it cleans out the system and reinstalls require me to be in front of the computer for a total of about ten minutes so it&#8217;s painless. Notice I said &#8221;in front of the computer&#8221;, the system does all of the work for me with some specially crafted bash scripts.

coproc help - a new feature in bash

In the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/bash" title="Bash" rel="homepage" href="http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html">bash version 4.0, there is a new concept called coproc. This is very useful for some of the daily tasks.

co-<a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000005a409" title="Process (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_%28computing%29">process starts a process in the background, optionally with a NAME, with which other processes can communicate. This can be a very <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/substitute_good" title="Substitute good" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good">good substitution for <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000048fac5" title="Pipeline (Unix)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29">pipes in lots of cases. You can learn more about coproc in the link below:

Download with browse with bash and wget

Been pretty busy for last couple of days. Will be busy for another few days, but here&#8217;s something to munch in the meantime (Script may need changes depending on the type of file you want to download or the site you are browsing, but the chnages should be minimal):

file=&#8221;/tmp/temp.dir&#8221;
url=&#8221;URL Here&#8221;
IFS=&#8217;
&#8217;
cont=&#8221;y&#8221;
while [ $cont != &#8221;n&#8221; ]
do
name=&#8221;&#8221;
wget &#8221;$url&#8221; -O $file -o /dev/null
for i in $(grep href $file |grep -v Parent)
do
name=${i##href=&#8221;}
name=${name%%&#8221;>}
echo $name
if [[ $name == *gz ]]
then
cont=&#8221;n&#8221;
fi
done
if [ ! $name ]
then
echo &#8221;No files here.. Exiting&#8221;
exit -1
fi
echo
if [ $cont == &#8221;n&#8221; ]
then
echo &#8221;Enter the filename for download :&#8221;
read file
fi
echo &#8221;Select one of the options:&#8221;
read product
url=&#8221;$url/$product&#8221;
echo &#8221;About to get $url&#8221;
done
wget &#8221;$url&#8221; -O $file -o /dev/null

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Transfer all the google feed URLs to rss2email.

Next step in restoring my settings was to get the working rules and all the blogs into rss2email. I have subscribed to more than 150 blogs. So, adding all of them manually was difficult.

For a time like this, I subscribe to all the blogs using google reader and then add them to rss2email. So I had quickly exported the google feeds list and then had to find a way to extract the URLs for the blog to the rss2email. The command to add a url is r2e add, so I wrote this one line just now to do the task for me.

bash script to periodically change the cursor theme.

#!/bin/bash
[[ &#8221;$1&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ &#8221;$2&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && (
cd ~/.icons
cont=&#8221;y&#8221;
echo &#8221;Select one of the icon themes&#8221;
echo &#8221;When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c&#8221;
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] && (
echo &#8221;Now trying …. : $i&#8221;
gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme &#8221;$i&#8221;
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme &#8221;$2&#8221;

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Post your free classifieds.

I have put up a free classifieds site here:

<a href="http://noah.amit-agarwal.co.in/" target="_blank">http://noah.amit-agarwal.co.in/