CrunchBang ~ cli

rpl - A Find & Replace Terminal Tool

Philip Newborough — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:34:48 GMT

Tonight I have mainly been working on Whird. I have been rewriting large chunks of code in an effort to optimise a bunch of functions. As a result of this, I had to change a series of strings in a number of files. As per normal when it comes to fiddly grep, sed and awk commands, I fired up Google and searched for some pointers. Whilst refreshing my memory, I came across a comment by an anonymous reader who suggested using the rpl command.

I had not previously come across rpl before, so I investigated. Turns out that rpl is a really handy text replacement tool — it makes recursive text replacement commands really simple; as simple as:

rpl [options] old_string new_string target_file(s)

Available options are:

--version          show program's version number and exit
-h, --help         show this help message and exit
-L, --license      show the software license
-x SUFFIX          specify file suffix to match
-i, --ignore-case  do a case insensitive match
-w, --whole-words  whole words (old_string matches on word boundaries only)
-b, --backup       make a backup before overwriting files
-q, --quiet        quiet mode
-v, --verbose      verbose mode
-s, --dry-run      simulation mode
-R, --recursive    recurse into subdirectories
-e, --escape       expand escapes in old_string and new_string
-p, --prompt       prompt before modifying each file
-f, --force        ignore errors when trying to preserve permissions
-d, --keep-times   keep the modification times on modified files
-t, --use-tmpdir   use $TMPDIR for storing temporary files
-a, --all          do not ignore files and directories starting with .

rpl is available to install from the Ubuntu repositories, install with the following command:

sudo apt-get install rpl

For more information about rpl, see: http://www.laffeycomputer.com/rpl.html

Tags: cli, commands, software, terminal, ubuntu, whird

Configure Wireless on the Command Line

Philip Newborough — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:06:13 GMT

Today I have mainly been attempting to create a very light installation of Ubuntu on an old Pentium III. I started by installing a base system with the Ubuntu alternative install disk. After the base system was installed I then tried to configure my wireless card from the command line. I was half expecting this to be a difficult task, however it wasn't actually too difficult and thanks to some rather nifty instructions I managed to get my wireless card working in no time. For future reference here are the necessary commands:

1. Turn the interface on with the following command:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

2. Scan for a list of all the available access points:

iwlist wlan0 scanning

3. Select the access point with the following command:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid ACCESSPOINT

4. Set WEP or WPA passphrase, if needed:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 key PASSPHRASE

5. Finally, connect to DHCP server and obtain an IP address:

sudo dhclient

I'll post more details about the actual system install when I get more time, for now I just wanted to get these instructions down in case I end up having to start again from scratch.

Tags: cli, networking, terminal, ubuntu

CPU Temperature via Terminal

Philip Newborough — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:52:50 GMT

Enter the following command in your Linux terminal to get the current running temperature of your CPU.

acpi -t

This is a handy command and one that I should be able to put to good use. My desktop is a little bit old and crusty and is forever overheating in the summer. It should be possible to use this command in conjunction with cron to set-up a warning system to let me know when my system is about to go into meltdown.

via the Ubuntu Forums

Tags: cli, commands, linux, terminal