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...
• 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.

File database

• The Perl scripts addidb, searchidb, mvidb and delidb access a MySQL database containing keywords relating to your files. See here for more information.

Other

• The Perl script mailbackup allows you to back up data in a mail account. More info...
• 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) 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.

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

• 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.
• The script writex writes a message to a user's most recently active terminal, including X terminals (ordinary write doesn't work on XTerms).
• A command-line mp3 player: The shell function mp3play uses mpg123 as a decoder and sox to play the sound.

Patches

Enhancements or bug fixes for some open-source programs. All patches are described in more detail on my patches page.

Links

• Simon Tatham has numerous home-made UNIX utilities and a patch for bash's job termination notification.
• This page on Adam Sampson's site lists some small utilities of his own as well as some links to other such pages