Roland's scripts page

Introduction

This page contains a number of scripts that I have written over the years. I’ve put them here because others might find them useful as well.

Most of these scripts try to only use features and commands that are usually available on UNIX-like operating systems. If a script is specific to a certain OS, it will be noted in the remarks.

The listed requirements do not include those utilities and shells that are customarily available on UNIX-like operating systems. Those include sh, sed, awk, grep, du, df, rm, cat and echo among others. The scripts usually include tests to see if the non-standard programs they need are available.

All these scripts are now in the public domain. Note that some of these scripts will need changes before they will work properly on your system!

Scripts

backup-local

This script syncronizes the partitions on my primary disk to a secondary disk that is partitioned exactly the same. By running this script every night from cron, I get a fresh backup every night, and during the day I can still use the previous backup to restore accidentally deleted files.

clean

This script cleans the current directory. As distributed it removes LaTeX auxiliary files like .dvi, .aux, .log etc, object files and libraries (.o, .a, .so) and editor backup files (*~). But it is easily augmented to remove other files as well.

envelope

This script asks for address data, and then produces a postscript file suitable for printing on an 110×220 mm envelope by any printer that prints envelopes from the middle of the feeder.

The resulting file (A4-size) looks like the picture on the right, which is turned 90° anti-clockwise, so that the top of the page is on the left.

Beware that you should edit this script before using it! The variables MYNAME, MYADRES and MYTOWN need to be changed to your address, which will be printed on the top-left side of the envelope.

dodumps

This script dumps UFS filesystems, and writes them to files in the specified directory after compressing them with xz. directory.

This script is FreeBSD specific! It can possibly be used on OpenBSD and NetBSD, but I haven’t tested it. Linux doesn’t use the UFS filesystem.

fixbb

This script takes as its single argument the name of a PostScript file. It calculates the so-called BoundingBox for the actual drawn contents of the file, and replaces the existing one with this newly calculated one.

flac2ogg

This script converts all sound files in flac format in the current directory to ogg vorbis format.

imgsize

If this script is supplied with an image file name, it prints out a well-formatted <img> tag. Feeding this script a file in a format that [identify][] doesn’t understand will produce odd results.

make-flac

The make-flac script takes as input a number of wav files and a file containing the song data, and converts them to flac format.

Since the flac format is lossless, this is IMHO the best way to backup CD’s. A flac file takes about half the space of an equivalent wav file. That is a better compression than can be achieved on wav files using compression tools like gzip, bzip2 or zip. A lot of open-source software players end even some hardware players (like the iAUDIO M5 and other Cowon models) can play flac files.

The wav files should be named trackNN.cdda.wav where NN is a number, as produced by cdparanoia. The format of the titles file is described inside the script.

make-mp3

The make-mp3 scripts takes as input a number of WAV files, and a file containing the song data, and converts them to variable bit rate MP3 format.

Note that the MP3 format is encumbered by patents, and that ogg vorbis usually produces smaller files with better quality. But MP3 is supported by many more devices.

The same restriction to the input files names as used by make-flac applies.

make-ogg

This script converts a number of wav files, and a file containing the song data, to ogg vorbis files.

markphotos

Adds a copyright notice to jpg pictures. I use it to mark the photos I take and put online. You need to replace my copyright notice with yours before using this script!

This script has been re-written in Python and now uses multiple cores on machines that have them.

mkindexpic

When given a number of picture file names, this script generates an index.jpg picture containing thumbnails of all the pictures.

mkphotopage

Creates a web page index.html in a directory of jpg files. The webpage references all the jpg files in the current directory.

mksmall

When this script is executed in a directory containing jpg files, it creates a subdirectory named sm where smaller copies of the jpg files are stored. The default size is 15% of the original, but that can be changed on the command line.

nospaces

Renames files with spaces in their filename by replacing those with underscores.

pdfselect

This script thee arguments. First the number of a start page (N), second the number of a start page (M) and third the name of a file. The numbered pages are then extracted and written as pageN-M.pdf or pageN.pdf if M equals N.

povmake

This script is a shortcut to render povray scenes at different resolutions and quality levels. I’ve used it for both doing quick checks on scenes that I’m working on and the final renderings.

Available resolutions range from a ‘small’ 320×200 to a ‘huge’ 1280×1024. Quality options range from ‘+Q3’ to ‘+Q11’, with appropriate extra options for every quality setting.

raw2pgm

Converts uncompressed DICOM format files to JPEG format, via PGM.

tolower

Renames files converting uppercase characters to lower case.