Compact sparse disk images via the command line

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Get the dimensions of most images from
the command line

Get the dimensions of most images from
the command line 12/02/2003 12:38 AM
You can use the file unix command in the Terminal to quickly find the dimensions of (most) images. karma:~/Sites/somepics me$ file * yel-pale-grad.gif: GIF image data, version 89a, 20 x 125 m46.jpg: JPEG ima...

Simple command-line editor of images

Simple command-line editor of images 09/04/2004 12:02 PM
PRE-ALPHA

10.3: Use Disk Utility to manage disk
images

10.3: Use Disk Utility to manage disk
images 11/10/2003 11:18 PM
I don't know if this functionality was already build into 10.2's disk tools, but Apple's new Disk Utility greatly improves the ease of working with disk images. You can drag disk images in the left window pane, just below th...

Self-Expanding Disk Images

Self-Expanding Disk Images 03/13/2003 10:21 AM
Apple has posted an article on how to create these disk images that auto-copy their contents when you download them...

Create OS 9 style .img disk images with
OS X

Create OS 9 style .img disk images with
OS X 06/07/2004 12:08 PM
I know that I'm not the only one out there who uses OS 9 once in a while. Not everyone has upgraded their software to Mac OS X, so whether you are trying to be compatible with other people, or just taking care of your own co...

Create a customized look for disk images
in 10.3

Create a customized look for disk images
in 10.3 09/09/2004 10:28 AM
Here is the method I usually use to create a disk image with customization for icon placement and size, default window size, background images, etc. These are the steps needed for Disk Utility in Panther, but you should be ab...

Making an Offline Disk Online from the
command prompt in XP.

Making an Offline Disk Online from the
command prompt in XP. 08/12/2004 09:56 AM

Add .iso to .toast to burn images with
Disk Utility

Add .iso to .toast to burn images with
Disk Utility 07/02/2004 11:21 AM
Probably this is something that every Mac owner learns in kindergarten, but just in case someone else got through school without it, here it is: I had a Toast image (with the file extension .toast) that 10.3 Disk Utility wou...

Notes and Tips: Duplicate Disk Images

Notes and Tips: Duplicate Disk Images 08/31/2004 03:13 PM
Mounting multiple copies of a disk image in Mac OS X creates problems.

Force-mount unmountable disk images

Force-mount unmountable disk images 09/15/2004 11:06 AM
On my machine, OS X 10.3.x seems to refuse to mount any disk image files (.DMG) after a few days of use, and DMG files which mounted just fine before now fail with a "No mountable file systems" error message. Most people ass...

Stop special treatment of
'internet-enabled' disk images

Stop special treatment of
'internet-enabled' disk images 02/18/2004 12:04 PM
I don't know about any of you, but I absolutely hate internet-enabled disk images. I do see the value in them when distributing software. I like to keep disk images sometimes, though, so I'd rather manually copy my own soft...

Close disk images on removable media
prior to logout

Close disk images on removable media
prior to logout 06/25/2004 10:25 AM
When you log out via fast user switching, OS X (Panther) does not automatically close any disk images you had mounted. If these images reside on removable media, then other users cannot unmount and remove the removable media...

Command Line PHP

Command Line PHP 12/20/2002 10:51 AM
Command Line PHP Since I was doing this yesterday, I appreciated this pointer from Keith (who also helpfully has links to Lord of the Rings Reviews) [_Go_]

MSI FAQ: Command-line for SMS
Distribution

MSI FAQ: Command-line for SMS
Distribution 06/24/2004 11:31 AM

PHP on the Command Line - Part 1

PHP on the Command Line - Part 1 06/16/2004 07:29 PM
Routine administration of your PHP Website is easily achieved via PHP's CLI, or command line interface. In the first instalment of his two-part series, Harry looks at the fundamentals of working with the PHP command line.

Command Line Progress Bar 1.09

Command Line Progress Bar 1.09 06/01/2004 10:34 AM
A simple command line tool to display information about a data transfer stream.

Command-Line Accountant 0.2

Command-Line Accountant 0.2 02/17/2004 05:39 AM
A command-line personal finance utility.

Command line blacklisting

Command line blacklisting 09/09/2004 01:15 AM

Just over a year ago, I started blacklisting domain names from links featured in comment spam. My idea then was that these blacklists could become a shared resource: people would publish their own blacklist and subscribe to those of people they trust, thus making it much harder for spammers to operate. While the sheer volume of spam domains meant that the technique was much less useful than I originally anticipated, I've continued to maintain my blacklist ever since as a preventative measure against repeat spammers.

I have a confession to make: all of my blog administration (with the exception of adding entries and blogmarks) is performed using phpMyAdmin. The trouble with writing your own software is that it's very easy to skimp on the backend tools, since you're the only person who will ever see them. Incidentally, this is the main reason I plan to switch to WordPress just as soon as I find the inspiration to write the necessary import scripts. Comments are deleted in phpMyAdmin, and domains are blacklisted by manually editing the blacklist.txt file via FTP.

This has been really bugging me, especially since I have so little other use for FTP that my only installed client is an unregistered version of Transmit (closes after ten minutes, won't save passwords along with account details). I've been muddling along with that for longer than I care to admit, but today I decided to take 10 minutes out to solve the problem once and for all. I could have put together a web interface for adding new domains but I wasn't really in the mood, so I decided to put time spent reading The Art of Unix Programming to good use and knock out a simple command line application.

The result (minus my login details) can be found here. Sample usage: ./blacklist.py www.domain.org www.domain2.com. It follows the Unix ideal of being the simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work, and ended up taking longer to write than I expected thanks mainly to the craziness of Python's ftplib . I've seen complaints about this before, and it thoroughly deserves its bad reputation.

Here's one example: retrlines is the method used to retrieve ascii text from the server. Bizzarely, it doesn't actually return the text receieved; instead, it expects you to provide it with a callback function that will be fed each line in turn, minus the newline. Sounds like a job for Stri ngIO, but StringIO objects don'y have a writeline method (required to add the newline back on). I ended up writing my own extension of the StringIO2 class and adding a writeline method just to preserve the newlines returned from the server!

Strange APIs aside, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. It follows a bunch of Unix design patterns (and skips others such as those related to configuration, but I'm not overly bothered about those) including the following:

1. A usage note is displayed if no arguments are provided.
2. Multiple domains can be blacklisted at once, by providing them as multiple command line arguments.
3. Domains that are already in the blacklist are skipped, and a message is written to standard error.
4. If the script suceeds, it doesn't say anything at all.

It also uses the common Python idiom of wrapping the principle logic in a function and then calling that from a block that runs only if the file is executed directly (the __name__ == '__main__' idiom) so that other Python code can import the module and reuse its functionality if required.

There's plenty of room for improvement: being able to pipe a list of domains in via standard input would be nice, and hard coding the (unencrypted) username and password is sloppy (as is expecting the blacklist.txt file to live in the FTP home directory). Even better, with SSH access the whole thing could be replaced with an infinitely more secure one-liner: echo www.domain-to-ban.org | ssh username@server "cat - >> blacklist.txt". I'm happy though: an irritating task has become much less irritating and I have some example code to fall back on next time I need to get mucky with ftplib.

Command-Line Accountant 0.11

Command-Line Accountant 0.11 12/21/2003 04:45 PM
A command-line personal finance utility.

SMS Command Line Script

SMS Command Line Script 12/28/2004 11:27 PM

SitePoint: PHP on the Command Line (Pt.
1)

SitePoint: PHP on the Command Line (Pt.
1) 06/16/2004 08:26 AM
A new article has been posted over on SitePoint.com from Harry Fuecks covering the first part of a series on PHP on the Command Line.

Abusing the command line

Abusing the command line 04/09/2004 04:08 PM

If you're running OS X, try this:

say -v Kathy `curl --silent http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=simonwillison | grep '<inbound' | sed -e 's/ <//' | sed -e 's/inboundblogs>/Simons blog has /' | sed -e 's/<\/inboundblogs>/ inbound blogs and /' | sed -e 's/inboundlinks>//' | sed -e 's/<\/inboundlinks>/ inbound links/'`

Your computer should read out to you my Technorati inbound blogs and inbound links, extracted from the Technorati web API. Parsing XML using sed is a nasty trick I picked up from this O'Reilly article; speaking the output of a command using the 'say' and the backtick shell operator was my moment of inspiration for the day.

ISU Command-Line Switches

ISU Command-Line Switches 01/01/2005 10:21 AM

A command line ogg to mp3 converter

A command line ogg to mp3 converter 08/09/2004 11:34 AM
Using the same paradigm as ChrisR's flac to mp3 command line script, I've done the same to convert ogg files to mp3s using command line tools. You'll need to download and compile the vorbis player/encoder tools for everyone ...

SitePoint: PHP on the Command Line (Pt.
2)

SitePoint: PHP on the Command Line (Pt.
2) 08/11/2004 08:33 AM
New on SitePoint today, there's a new posting from Harry Fuecks in a continuation of his "PHP on the Command Line" series - Part 2.

Command Line Accountant

Command Line Accountant 12/09/2003 12:22 AM
Version 0.1 has been released

Building MSI command line

Building MSI command line 01/19/2004 12:34 AM

ISU Command Line Syntax

ISU Command Line Syntax 07/26/2004 03:52 AM

PHP on the Command Line - Part 2

PHP on the Command Line - Part 2 08/11/2004 07:01 PM
Take your knowledge of the command line interface a step further with Harry's PHP-centric series. Part 2 shows how you can hook up a command line PHP script with existing command line tools provided by your operating system.

The Command Line Is Your Friend

The Command Line Is Your Friend 03/06/2004 01:56 AM

If you're in the tech field, it might behoove you to know your command line utilities, and to have a copy of Cygwin handy if you run Windows. There are reasons why those old-school UNIX guys look down their long beards at the rest of us with disdain for not knowing the system shell. I ran across a great use of command line tools today that I thought I'd share.

Continue reading "The Command Line Is Your Friend"

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Pizza From the Command Line

Pizza From the Command Line 05/07/2004 07:14 PM

PHP Command Line Module

PHP Command Line Module 06/04/2004 10:43 AM

PEAR Console Classes: Here's a tutorial on a fascinating little PEAR module that facilitates using PHP from the command line. It has methods for rendering tables, displaying progress bars, and doing color formatting on ANSI compliant terminals, this giving you some flexibility when developing PHP command line apps. Fascinating what these guys come up with.

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Command Line Progress Bar 1.04

Command Line Progress Bar 1.04 10/31/2003 05:11 PM
A simple command line tool to display information about a data transfer stream.

Command Line Timeclock 0.2

Command Line Timeclock 0.2 06/07/2004 09:17 AM
A command line timesheet application.

10.3: Fax from command line (or
AppleScript)

10.3: Fax from command line (or
AppleScript) 12/05/2003 11:21 AM
I was working on this to be able to fax from Filemaker with FM scripting and AppleScripting. I needed to print to a file (a .ps file), then send the resulting file to the fax. Fax is actually a CUPS print queue, and I just ne...

Command Line Timeclock 0.2-r2

Command Line Timeclock 0.2-r2 06/13/2004 09:25 PM
A command line timesheet application.

Mac OS X command line tab completion

Mac OS X command line tab completion 09/23/2004 03:00 AM
Tech-Recipes Sep 23 2004 5:45AM GMT

Quit applications from the command line

Quit applications from the command line 06/25/2004 10:25 AM
The recent hint to “Extend the power of 'open -a'” inspired me to write this quick hack to quit an application: #!/bin/sh echo | osascript <<EOF tell application "$*" quit end tell EOF Call it quit, save it in ...

PowerArchiver Command Line Support
Add-On v3.51

PowerArchiver Command Line Support
Add-On v3.51 06/30/2004 05:48 PM
PowerArchiver Command Line Support Add-On is a free cosole utility for Windows which includes full built-in support for creating ZIP, CAB, LHA (LZH), BH and JAR archives, as well as extracting ZIP, RAR, ARJ, ACE, CAB, LHA (LZH), TAR, GZIP, BH, ZOO, ARC, JAR, XXE and UUE archives. [Freeware 1.15 MB]
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Compact sparse disk images via the command line

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