Hacking gnu-linux things
I explained in another post why I decided to switch my bibliography (back) from Zotero to BibLatex. Here I give some (minimal) hints about the process, in case it might help others going the same path.
After years of using Zotero, I recently moved all my bibliography (back) to BiBteX. In this article I briefly explain the rationale for this move. It might give some clues (of course, very personal and subjective) to other researchers who might be pondering a similar decision. Another article gives some hints regarding the actual process of converting the database.
1 The script
Based on this script on Emacs Wiki I just added the option tu use as protocol to open urls in the form emacsclient:///path/to/file+linenumber
#!/bin/bash args="" nw=false # check if emacsclient is already running if pgrep -U $(id -u) emacsclient > /dev/null; then running=true; fi # check if the user wants TUI mode for arg in "$@"; do if [ "$arg" = "-nw" ] || [ "$arg" = "-t" ] || [ "$arg" = "--tty" ] then nw=true fi done # if called without arguments - open a new gui instance if [ "$#" -eq "0" ] || [ "$running" != true ]; then args=(-c $args) # open emacsclient in a new window fi if [ "$#" -gt "0" ]; then # if 'Vemacsclient -' open standard input (e.g. pipe) if [[ "$1" == "-" ]]; then TMP="$(mktemp /tmp/emacsstdin-XXX)" cat >$TMP args=($args --eval '(let ((b (generate-new-buffer "*stdin*"))) (switch-to-buffer b) (insert-file-contents "'${TMP}'") (delete-file "'${TMP}'"))') # If called as protocol syntax of call is emacsclient:///path/to/myfile+line elif [[ "$1" == emacsclient:* ]]; then args=($args --eval '(let ((protocall (split-string (substring "'$1'" 12) "+"))) (find-file (nth 0 protocall)) (when (nth 1 protocall) (goto-char (point-min)) (forward-line (string-to-number (nth 1 protocall)))))') else args=($@ $args) fi fi # emacsclient $args if $nw; then emacsclient "${args[@]}" else echo ${args[@]} >> /tmp/ecargs (nohup emacsclient "${args[@]}" > /dev/null 2>&1 &) > /dev/null fi
2 Define the script as handler for emacsclient:/// links
Assuming the script is at home/vic.local/bin/Vemacsclient
2.1 Created a temporary file named vic-emacsclient.desktop
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Type=Application Exec=/home/vic/.local/bin/Vemacsclient Name=Emacsclient Comment=Maybe launches Victor's emaclient Categories=Editor;Development Icon=emacs MimeType=x-scheme-handler/emacsclient;
2.2 Installed the protocol
xdg-desktop-menu install vic-emacsclient.desktop xdg-mime default vic-emacsclient.desktop x-scheme-handler/emacsclient
3 Usage
- Open file from commandine
Vemacsclient /path/to/file +line:column- Pipe shell output to emacs buffer
ls / | Vemacsclient -- Open file with emacsclient protocol
emacsclient:///path/to/file+lineThis is especially useful for Drupal’s (Symfony’s?) Web Profiler plugin. I set its IDE settings toemacsclient:@file+@lineand then clicking any file links in the profiler opens the file with Emacs. Can be very useful to understand where a particular bit of code gets generated.
This is a handy way to control running instances of VLC from external scripts (if you invoke vlc in the script, there are better interfaces like rc). It’s also useful if want to control VLC through keyboard shortcuts while it’s running in the background. If your window manager doesn’t pass the shortcuts to the background process (xfwm4 at least doesn’t), you can start by issuing this in a shell:
dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause
It should start/pause the backgrounded player. If it works, you can assign a shortcut to the command using the standard keyboard shortcut editor of your window manager.
VLC adheres to the Media Player Remote Interface Specification (MPRIS) which opens up for the commands listed here. The usual start/pause etc. are in the .Player interface.
Note that some commands require a numeric argument. Seek for example needs a number of microseconds to seek forward or backward. But you don’t just give it the number. You must manually specify the type of the argument like this:
dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Seek int64:"2000000"
There are other weird (unpredictable ?) syntaxes for rates and volumes. Check this post for more examples.
The point in finding its scale is to program Yoshimi, a soft synth, to play in tune with it. The microtonal tuning of Yoshimi will be covered in another tutorial.
Useful and (imho) elegant bash script found here to remove duplicate files based on their md5 sum. I use it to get rid on duplicate emails in my mailbox.
#!/bin/bash
declare -A arr
shopt -s globstar
for file in **; do
[[ -f "$file" ]] || continue
read cksm _ < <(md5sum "$file")
if ((arr[$cksm]++)); then
echo "rm $file"
fi
done
Of course, remove the echo on line 10 to put the rm in effect. I actually replace the rm by a mv $file ~/.local/share/Trash/files/, for more safety.
I recently ripped a 5 CDs collection of "1001 sound effects". There was no CDDB info for it, so the tracks came all as "01 - 1001 Sound effects.flac", "02 - 1001 Sound effects.flac" and so on. This makes the ripped files pretty useless. I needed meaningful filenames in order to later find specific effects.
Fortunately, a website had the complete list of 1001 names (someone may have OCRd the booklet). I copied/pasted it in a text file named ListeCD1.txt, one name per line. Then with the help of this stackoverflow answer, I could batch-rename all the files in the CD1 directory (I actually used cp to a new directory rather than mv in place, just to be safe)
files=( *.flac )
i=0
while read -r newname; do
cp "${files[$i]}" "renamed/`printf %02d $(( i+1 ))`_$newname.flac";
(( i++ ));
done < ListeCD1.txt
Command to remove older kernels on a linux machine:
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge
Check with an extra 'uname -r' that the current kernel is not amongst those being removed.