Miscellaneous Utilities
Dick Grune
These are some useful (to me, that is) UNIX utilities that I have written over the years. Most of them are what one could call `orientation aids'; for example, `lmr' ("List Most Recent") will quickly tell me what on earth I was doing in this directory when I last visited it perhaps half a year ago. Most programs do more than has been indicated here; many have man pages; some are trivial but have yet proved useful.
Most programs are served as tar files: *.tar. Most compile on other OSs. Some come with .exe files.
eh
EH - as in "Eh?" - gives a first impression of the contents of its arguments, which may be text files, object files, directories, etc. A usual call is 'eh *' to get a first impression of the contents of the files in a directory. Less wide than the UNIX command `file', but digs deeper.
findeqf
FINDEQF - Find Equal Files - finds duplicate files in a directory and its subdirectories. Good for cleaning up the file system. Very fast and can handle large numbers of files.
lmr
LMR - List Most Recent - displays 'ls -l' info of the 8 most recently modified files in a directory.
nfls
NFLS - list New FiLeS - will list the names of all "interesting" files in a given directory and its subdirectories. A file is "interesting" if you would like the system to now make a backup of it; the heuristics are partly programmable. A typical call is ' tar r `nfls` ' . Good for keeping the backups small and fast. Solaris only.
notin
NOTIN prints all ASCII95 characters NOT in a given file. Good for finding out which characters you can use for massive editing.
prlink
PRLINK - PRint symbolic LINKs - follows symbolic links, and prints one line for every step it takes. It can also silently test the liveness of a symbolic link. Good for file system hygiene.
tally
TALLY prints a character count per character for a given file, including unprintable ones. Good for spotting "funny" characters in files.
utime
UTIME - Update mTIME - sets the mtime of a given file to a given date/time or to that of another file. Good for creatively adjusting the file system. Compiles on DOS.
uudecode
An accommodating uudecode that will extract multiple encoded files from multiple uue files, ignoring crud. Compiles on DOS.