These are Bash script “snippets” that are useful or interesting, and that we felt should be made freely available rather than being locked up in our proprietary scripts.
ansicolors.sh: A quick and easy way to add ANSI colors to shell scripts.
change_hplj_status.sh: Make an HP LaserJet network printer say arbitrary things on the front LCD. Used occasionally on our HP LaserJet 4000 to make the status screen read “FEED ME A CAT”
convert_all_to_xz.sh: We keep a big archive of source code files for all the programs needed to build a complete Linux system. That requires lots of gigabytes of disk space, and programs are often distributed in space-inefficient formats like gzip. This script, when run in the root directory of such an archive, recursively converts all .tar.{lzo,gz,bz2,lzma} files to .tar.xz format with maximum compression for more efficient storage.
dispatch.sh: A Bash function that enables multiprocessing in limited scenarios. We use this to unpack one archive per CPU core at a time and to process a couple of text files per core in a huge directory of text files. Add this function to the start of your script, then call “dispatch [command] [arguments] and this function will handle the forking for you. If you need the dispatched commands to complete at any point later in your script, run “wait $(jobs -p)” and the forked processes will complete before the script continues.
go32.sh and go64.sh: If you create a chroot environment under a directory, you can run these scripts while in that chroot directory to perform the proper mount and unmount commands needed to make that system work better.
pidgin_html2text.sh: A quick and ugly hack to convert Pidgin HTML-formatted log files to Pidgin text log files.
show_dupes.sh: Run inside a software source code archive (see convert_all_to_xz above) to see probable duplicated programs, even if the version numbers differ.
tt_newcat.sh: Before we knew the ‘pv’ progress viewer utility existed, this is how we would test a hard drive and get a progress meter for the process. We haven’t used it in years, and it is presented here in the hopes that someone will find it to be useful.