Volker Schatz's software directory

Software

To prevent disappointments, I have to state right away that all of these are command-line programs, both because I tend to work mostly in terminal windows and because I lack the time to program nice GUIs. So, no eye-candy. Additionally, even though all of the programs work well for their intended purpose, different people work in different ways, and not all of them might be useful to everybody. To facilitate your decision whether to try them out, I have classified them as follows:

Production code

Understand and adapt

To be used in pipes

Experimental or hackers only

Hardware related

VHDocL, a documentation utility for designs coded in the hardware description language VHDL. More info...
bined, an automated binary editor. More info...
The octave script binhist generates histograms of binary data. Download...

Sound related

sndsys, a powerful audio stream processing toolkit. More info...
mksam generates long loopable samples from short ones. Download. More info...
alsacap serves to list ALSA devices and explore their possible configuration parameters. Download. More...
fifo, a first-in-first-out buffer which reads from stdin and writes to stdout. Useful for buffering audio data to avoid hickups when playing an audio CD digitally or for other real-time applications where latency is not an issue. Download. More info...
maxwav substitutes the maximum length in the header of a piped .wav file. Download.

Web spidering and information retrieval

wfind is a powerful web search spider. More info...
The Perl scripts addidb, searchidb, mvidb and delidb access a MySQL database containing keywords relating to your files. See here for more information.
The Perl script mailbackup allows you to back up data in a mail account. More info...
Several Perl scripts that operate on HTML files: For viewing HTML with proper indentation, viewing differences (uses HTML::Diff), and deleting certain tags by path.

Other

The Perl script imgtime.pl allows you to re-synchronise the times embedded in the EXIF information of digital photos. It shifts a set of photos so that one of them receives a certain time, so that you can photograph a clock and adjust the times of all your photos.
The shell script thumbindex uses ImageMagick to generate thumbnail pages of images (25 thumbnails each). The thumbnails' caption contains the image file name and, for those ImageMagick versions which support EXIF, the time and date of exposure (EXIF key DateTimeOriginal).
The small program motoacc serves to access a Motorola cellphone from the command line. It requires the p2kmoto library. It was created because moto4lin did not work for me.

Scripts

Here are some of my shell functions and scripts which save me from having to do numerous odiously boring tasks myself. Experts may want to adapt some of them to their needs.

Most of these (plus some more, and snippets in other programming languages) are now available on the code snippet database Snipplr.

Little file system helpers

mkcd: A shell function for creating a directory and descending into it in one go.
The reverse: rmcd, a shell function for leaving an empty directory and removing it.
The shell script mkscript creates an empty shell script for each of its arguments, which contains just the line "#!/bin/sh" and is an executable file. It then calls your $EDITOR with the same list of arguments. Saves the first 50 or so keypresses every time you write a new shell script. mkperl does the same thing for perl scripts; mkpython for python scripts.

Serial and parallel multiprocessing

The following longer scripts all support the -h command line switch to obtain a brief usage message.

The shell script para runs the same command for several files (or other kinds of arguments) in parallel. It keeps your multi-core CPU busy and gets quick results when encoding OGG Vorbis or performing similar tasks.
The Perl script nametracks.pl comfortably names ripped audio tracks after enumerated song titles.
renum renames or moves a series of files to numbered destination files.
mulmv renames or moves all files which start with a certain prefix to files starting with a different prefix. Prefixes may include paths.
My enhanced version of Perl rename supports numbering files. Download. More info...

Other stuff

The shell script float.sh uses the C preprocessor to print out the floating-point limit constants that used to be contained explicitly in the float.h header file.
tc.pl is a calculator for time durations which accepts operands in minutes:seconds or hours:minutes:seconds form and outputs results in both total seconds and the two other formats.
graftat makes mkisofs's graft points feature more usable and thereby facilitates inserting files and directories at a given path in a CD-ROM image. It has the semantics of cp or mv and outputs graft points in the right format for a mkisofs command line.

Patches

Enhancements or bug fixes for some open-source programs, primarily those whose authors do not accept patches or which are so paralysed by bureaucracy that bug reports are lost in Kafka-land. Not all of them apply to the newest version of their program; they are described in more detail on my patches page.

Program	Version	Purpose	Download	More info
`hexedit`	1.2.12	Advanced search	Get it	More...
Net::SMTP::TLS	0.12	Various fixes	Get it	More...
Samba client	3.0.22	Toggle commands	Get it	More...
Nethack Falconseye	?	Message output	Get it	More...
Gnuplot	4.2	Log scale TeX labels	Get it	More...
Gnuplot	3.7.1	Log scale TeX labels	Get it	More...