Quick Hacks

These are various things I've written to solve simple problems or experiment with something. They aren't industrial strength, may not even be useful, but are somewhat interesting. Many of these were written years ago and none involved serious effort, so don't consider any of these "products".

fuzzydupe.c

I collected a bunch of taglines from different places and wanted to cull them for the good stuff. Unfortunately, small variations of punctuation and whitespace often resulted in sort -u turning up duplicates. This program will do compares solely on the alphanumeric content of a line, and print the first match. It requires a dictionary-sorted input (like GNU sort gives you if you specify a locale).

It would be even more interesting if this did soundex comparisons... perhaps I'll get around to it sometime.

list-homepages.c

This is a simple program I wrote once to create a list of who on the system has homepages. It looks for ~/public_html/index.html for everyone in the passwd file. It's easily modified to show only those in a specific group, and runs as a CGI program.

testlock.c

A quick and dirty program to test whether file locking works. Run one copy, and it'll try to get an fcntl lock on a file. Run a second copy, and it'll try to get the lock again (it should fail). It's useful to tell if you have working locks on a network filesystem like NFS or Samba.

laststalk.c

Generates a histogram of what times a given user is most likely to log into a system. Probably not that interesting any more, now that there are few multiuser Unix systems in serious use, but might be entertaining.

check-dirs.c

Goes around looking for people with world or group-writable home directories, so you can yell at them for opening rhost vulnerabilities.

clipartsample

Got TeX and a bunch of EPS files you want a clip art catalog of? This will create a postscript file to view or print.

cbtex

This is a short script which uses the chbar.sh script from the LaTeX changebar package to pull a tagged version from CVS and generate a version with changebars, so you can see what was modified since then. Very useful for collaboration with others. Uses the latexmk script from CTAN to do the LaTeX runs.

wpinstallfonts

This is a small script to install large numbers of fonts within Corel WordPerfect Office and Corel Graphics on Linux. The fonttastic font installer only lets you add one font at a time. Since both products have long been discontinued, this is of mostly of historical interest.