Mitch Richling: Some Software

Linked below you will find a few software tools I have written over the years. Most of them are UNIX centric. You can find a few more tools intended for UNIX system administrators here. You may also be interested in some of the code on may Programming Examples page as well.

I sometimes find myself on a platform without od or hexdump, so I keep my own little hexDump.rb ruby script on my thumb drive. It produces a "canonical" hex dump of whatever data you give it. The format is quite wide and uses terminal colors to denote non-printable characters – I generally use quite large, color xterms.

LaTeX and TeX create a great number of temporary files that can seriously clutter up your hard drive. This little script, nuke_tex.sh, finds and deletes these temporary files in a relatively safe way – note that I did not say "complete safe", I said "relatively safe". The algorithm used is to find .tex files, and then delete files in the same directory with the same base name and an extension typically associated with temporary TeX files. The only exception is directories named 'auto' – they get deleted if any .tex file is fond in the same directory – these auto directories get created by Emacs.

I do a lot of development, and most of the time if I install a library I also what the associated documentation and/or development files for that library. Debian puts this stuff in different packages, and sometimes I forget to install them all. To help me keep track of things, I have a little script that looks at the current system and tries to find all of the related packages that I may have forgotten to install: debFindRelatedPackages.rb

I find myself comparing package lists on different Debian and/or Ubuntu systems quite a lot – why is this tool working on machine A but broken on machine B, did I get all my favorite stuff installed after an upgrade, do all the systems on my home network have the same packages, etc… For these, and related tasks, I have a little helper script: debCmpPackages.rb.

mpmws.rb is a little ruby program that implements a simple web server providing browsable directory index lists, HTML index support (index.html), and CGI support. While not as sophisticated as web servers like Apache, this web server is more than adequate for testing things like CGI scripts client side AJAX-style code.