The Dude network monitor is like a combination of nmap, visio, and nagios to discover / identify network devices, make a graphical image to depict topology, and monitor open ports for service health. It runs under Windows, Linux Wine, and OSX Darwine.
* It doesn’t by itself plot geographical locations, but you can use a background image of a map and arrange things yourself.
Freshmeat.net has changed its name, so this title’s gonna make less sense. *shrug*
Y’know those websites that host files but make you wait and fill out a captcha? FreeRapid is a download manager that knows how to interact with 230+ of em, so you can do more interesting things than stare at a countdown.
It’s mainly for when you’ve got several urls to queue up, but apparently it can save Hulu and YouTube videos too.*
It’s updated relentlessly to keep up with those sites and fetches new plugins each time you start it.
If you start it with the ” --portable” arg, it’ll keep its config files in its own directory.
* To set a preferred YouTube video quality, dig through some menus… Options/Preferences/Plugins/youtube.com/options.
If you haven’t dealt much with regular expressions, The Regex Coach is an invaluable learning tool.
Give it a pattern at the top, and in a demo string at the bottom, it highlights the matching segments.
You’ll get waaay more benefit from sed, grep, and string replacement in programming languages once you’ve trained a bit with this.
When you put this knowledge to use, there will be some variation from environment to environment when it comes to the fancy tricks: basic regex < extended regex < perl regex. Some commands have args to choose which syntax. And depending on quoting, you may need to backslash-escape stuff.
This general regex reference is excellent (nav on the left of that page links to more reference pages, as does the heading of each table).
When you’ve got a couple similar text files and you only want to make a few lines match, the diff command’s not so helpful.
WinMerge is a two-pane GUI that lets you scroll from difference to difference, deciding which blocks one pane should copy from the other. Like the command, WinMerge can also compare directories: altered files among the results can be double-clicked to see what’s inside.
Linux equivalents include Meld, KDiff, and tkdiff. Or running WinMerge Portable under Wine.
Aside: Linux GUIs have shortcuts too (text .desktop files). A few lines of echo and the google-resistant specs will create one.
Shortcut is a Windows command to create, edit, or query windows shortcuts (binary .lnk files) from batch scripts.
It handles target, arguments, working dir, normal/minimized/maximized, icon, hotkey, and description. Everything but the Compatibility tab, which I think is an explorer/registry thing, not intrinsic to lnk files.
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Unicode is painful for three reasons.
I just found uconv. It’s pipable, and I don’t hate it yet ;) .
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PStart is a nifty little launcher for USB drives. Tell it about the portable apps you’re carrying, and it’ll sit in the tray as a second start menu.
Technically it isn’t limited to jumpdrives. All its paths are relative, so your suite can be distributed in a folder.
Occasionally I have to parse xml, which is often not grep-friendly. Luckily, there’s XMLStarlet (the actual command’s named ‘xml’) to make it relatively easy, if longwinded for a prompt. It’s in Linux repositories, and there’s a Windows version.
For this post, I’ll be referring to an example file that looks like this.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Cast>
<Character gender='M'>
<Name>Fry</Name>
<Job>Delivery Boy</Job>
<Species>Human</Species>
<From>
<Location>Earth</Location>
<Location>New York</Location>
<Location>Brooklyn</Location>
</From>
</Character>
…
</Cast>
1) Loop through all characters, printing the value of their name tag and a newline.
xml sel -t -m "/Cast/Character" \
-v "Name" \
-n futurama_cast.xml
# Zapp
# Leela
# Amy
# Zoidberg
# Fry
# Bender
# Professor
# Kif
Netcat is reaaallly handy for piping stuff over networks. But it’s also been largely unchanged for years. There were a few forks and rewrites but they tended to be linux-only. One of the tricks it could do was ip/port scan. Scanning happened to be the primary function of the Nmap project, and so it grew to incorporate netcat features, and much more. Behold Ncat!
Edit (2010-08-03): 5.35DC1 made “-l -e” exit on disconnect, and “-l -e -k” keep awaiting new connections.
Edit (2010-03-16): I announced app this too early. 5.30b1 corrected the piping bugs I mentioned before. However, combining -l and -e still makes a server that never dies on its own (acts like -k), and must be killed manually. That might be fixed in a later release.
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