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Script-fu: cat directly to X clipboard

Ronnie — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:48:52 +0000

Have you ever wanted to ‘cat’ a file directly to the clipboard? OF COURSE, why else would you be reading this sentence?

Simply install ‘xclip’, which is simple also, if you are on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Anything that you pipe to it goes to the X11 clipboard. Once there, you can just hit the middle mouse button to paste it where you want, just as if you had highlighted it. So you can do things like this:

$ cat some.file | xclip
$ nslookup somehost | xclip
$ ./runsomeawesomescriptthatyouwanttheoutputintheclipboard.sh | xclip

How to create a tar of files you have updated in SVN

Ronnie — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:35:32 +0000

I had to recently send some modified files to someone so that they could take a look at what I was doing. OH NOES! How do I gather them all up at once?

tar cvzf somefile.tar.gz `svn stat | awk '{print "test -f " $2 " && echo " $2}' | bash`

Word.

To break it down:

The svn stat command is getting all the files that have changed obviously.

The awk command its piped to is the real part that’s doing the work. The awk command prints

test -f file && echo file

Pipe that through bash, and you have commands, which essentially will echo the file if the file is a file. Simple? No? I mean, it will not print it out if it’s a directory, so you don’t have to worry about it adding entire directories.

Surround that whole thing in backquotes (that’s the one with the tilde (that’s the one next to the ‘1′ key ( I’m not telling you where the ‘1′ key is))) and give it as the argument to the tar command.

My adventures with Hardy

Ronnie — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:14:12 +0000

I finally upgraded my computer to Ubuntu 8.04, but unfortunately my VMWare server didn’t work any more. That led me into a whole bunch of things that I noticed wrong with my upgrade. Allow me to explain the idiocity.

First, for some reason, even after upgrading, I was still booting into the old 7.10 kernel(2.6.22-14). A quick change to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file cleared that up. I just copied one of the other entries and then modified it so that it pointed to the new kernel (2.6.24-16).

Great. I booted up and then…had no wireless. I had forgotten how I set it up before, until I came across this page. For some reason, Hardy breaks newer Broadcom wireless cards (BCM4312, rev. 02 to be exact). But that page has pretty direct instructions on how to fix your po’ computer…that is, if you have internet…which you probably do, if you’re looking at this page.

Great. Ok now I can install VMWare. I had it installed before, but something made it get all scared and I suppose it scurried away to /dev/null for eternity. Suicide must have been more appealing to the VMWare.

Apparently there are issues with VMWare on Hardy, but following this page seemed simple enough. Except when I ran:

sudo ./runme.pl

It gave me this error:

A previous installation of VMware software has been detected.

The previous installation was made by the tar installer (version 3).

Keeping the tar3 installer database format.

Error: Unable to execute "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl.

So great, it left pieces of itself behind, except without a shovel to clean them up with. This was easily cleared up by removing the /etc/init.d/vmware directory.

After that, everything worked great. I was able to open up my old XP instance perfectly.