Initially, I wrote this script to give me frequent feedback on the signal strength. This is useful when adjusting antennas to that sweet spot that give stronger signals; especially if you’re testing some homemade tinfoil parabolic reflectors! 😉 If you have a portable wireless device, like a netbook, you can ssh into your (wireless) desktop and run wireless-strength to get realtime feedback on adjustments to the access point’s antenna… assuming the connection doesn’t break. 😛 And, of course, you can just walk around running it on your mobile device to create a kind of wireless heatmap.
If you have gnuplot, you can also generate graphs from the data with ws-plot. This is me walking around my house with my notebook:
I started in my room (40% 🙁 ), which is where the first peak is – near the window. Left my room, back to 40%, peak near window again, then bathroom… 40%. The climb from 40-80% is me walking towards the TV room (PS3 lives in a solid 80% zone, at least!). Walked upstairs, got 100% in most areas (that’s where the Access Point is) – tried a bedroom, dropped to 40%.
This script originated years back, but I recently tried using it on my laptop and it didn’t work! Unacceptable! The original parsed the output of iwconfig. But what showed up as “Quality=30/70” on my desktop, would show up as “Quality:4” on my laptop. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Even the character after “Quality” was different! o.O The output of iwconfig is driver dependent, which is why I looked to network-manager. I figured there’s probably a nice dbus command I can send to network-manager for that purpose – but I got tired of looking and decided to just parse output again. :/ Luckily, network-manager includes nm-tool. It’s certainly not a clean solution, but it works for now.
I also used updating rewriting the script as an excuse to get better acquainted with git – which I’m really liking.
Every time I do a bash script, I vow to do the next script in Python. I like Python and I don’t like Bash… but there’s a certain… nativeness or dependency-free elegance to bash scripts. Still, I hate writing them, and the next script’s in Python! 😛
I just upgraded from 2.6.3 (using my “wp-upgrade” script), and It’s fantastic! Go watch a video about the biggest features. It even includes an “automatic upgrade!!” This pretty much deprecates my script, unless you want to maintain snapshots of each version. (I’m not sure if anyone other than me was using it to begin with… but anyhow….) 🙂
Here’s a bash script that you can pipe output into and tell it to run a specific program with the output as arguments. I’ve named it open-with and placed it in my personal script directory: /home/steve/bin/. Look within the script at a couple of the examples for how to use it.
#!/bin/bash
PROG=`basename $0`
DESC="Read arguments from standard input and run a specified program
with them. Meant to be used as output for a pipe."
USAGE="OUTPUT | $PROG \"PROGRAM-NAME [OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS]\""
EXAMPLES="
# List (with details), all the files that include \"downloads\" in their name:
find /home/ -iname \"*downloads*\" | $PROG \"ls -l\"
# Queue all AVI files in current directory in vlc:
ls *.avi | $PROG vlc
# View all time-related icons with eye-of-gnome:
find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex \".*[^mul]time.*\" | open-with eog
"
function Usage() {
echo "DESCRIPTION: $DESC" ; echo
echo "USAGE: $USAGE" ; echo
echo -n "EXAMPLES: $EXAMPLES"
}
# Quick check to see it's being called correctly, if not, print Usage and exit
if [ ${#@} -ne 1 ]
then
Usage
exit
fi
files=() # empty array
while read -r # read from stdin
do
files+=( "$REPLY" ) # add result of read to array
done
# assume $1 is a valid program
$1 "${files[@]}" # pass arguments to specified program
Motivation
You’re sitting at the command line and have a list of images (in different locations) that you would like to browse. Most image viewers let you iterate over a set of images, but only within the same directory. What would be great is if they accepted input from stdin through a pipe!
$ cat my_list_of_images | my_image_viewer
I didn’t find anything that did that, but using the open-with script, you can do something similar:
Browsing a select list of images is actually kind of nice. It’s like a playlist for your image viewer – a viewlist. 🙂 Anyway, I’m sure there’s some problems with this script. Feel free to provide suggestions in the comments. But I certainly don’t want to look at it for a while….
I hate shell scripting
With a passion. It’s not a great surprise… many programmers do. I’m willing to go on record and state that I hate it even more than PERL programming. I rarely do it, and when I decide to try something that seems like it would be simple, it turns out taking forever due mostly to quirks. The rest of this post is a bit about how I went about writing this script, which ended up being mostly given to me by some #bash gurus on IRC. And it’s a bit of a rant.
Although not many GUI programs seem to accept stdin as input, most accept filenames as arguments:
So I figured I would just have to convert the list of images into an acceptable format: quoted, absolute filenames, separated by space. Doing this depends entirely on the format the list is currently in, but it’s likely a list of unquoted filenames separated by newlines:
So I can’t pipe it into my image viewer, but I can use the output as the command-line arguments if I change the newlines to spaces. find has an option for formatting the output which is perfect:
That’s great for me, because I’m using find. But not very useful if I’m not, so I wanted something more generic. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and again, I’m by no means a command-line guru. But here’s how I started:
$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'
This wrapped the lines in double-quotes and join them together with a space in between. The find command is the same as before, minus the formatting because that’s what I was trying to find an alternative to. The output of find is piped into sed, which adds a " at the beginning of each line. This output is then sent to another sed which replaces the newline character at the end of each line with a closing double-quote and a space, joining all lines into a single line. Finally, that output is piped into tr which replaces the one remaining newline with a final double-quote.
If the files don’t include spaces or other troublesome characters (mine didn’t), then you could get away with simply changing the newlines into spaces. But again, I wanted something generic.
Anyway, now that we have something that creates the desired input, we just have to wrap it in back-ticks and put the whole mess as the argument to the image viewer! In my case, I’m using eye-of-gnome (or eog).
$ eog `find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'`
Wait a second. That doesn’t actually work. Why not? Running the backtick contents by itself seemed to produce the correct output. Copying this output verbatim as arguments to eog worked as expected. The problem was that when the quoted arguments were manually entered on the command-line, bash (silently) escapes the filenames, removing the quotes, adding backslashes before space,s etc. But when the pipeline is wrapped in backticks, the result is not escaped, and eog complains about not being able to find files that begin with quotes. Fine. I was not about to write a bash “escape” script – something like that should already exist, right? And it should be built in to bash! Perhaps it’s even called “escape“. Well, if there exists such a built-in, I couldn’t find it. But I had to be going about this the wrong way. Heading over to IRC, it was kind of difficult to explain the problem, but ferret eventually gave me the meat of the script above:
files=(); while read -r; do files+=( "$REPLY" ); done < <(find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*"); eog "${files[@]}"
It worked! I thanked him and began studying it. There were still a couple things I didn't understand:
Why two angle brackets with a space between them? I understand the first one is probably redirecting input, but I don't understand that one next to the opening parenthesis. Answer: The <(command) actually puts command's output in a temporary file and produces that filename. So <(command) becomes tempfile. (Thanks, kojiro.)
If I open some video or audio files in totem using open-with, there's an odd delay. Using vlc doesn't produce a delay, however.
And to think this was originally going to be a micro-blog post in Twitter and identi.ca. Wow. It's safe to say I still hate shell scripting. 🙂
Even though the WordPress upgrade is easy, it’s troublesome. So I wrote a script to do it for me. Yep. There’s lots of these out there. And a lot of hosts (including mine) have a one-click install/update thing. But for some reason, I decided to write my own script. In python. Got to use a bunch of modules I’ve never used before, so it was a good experience.
How to Use
Run this script from the directory that contains your wordpress directory, on your server. I think it requires Python version 2.3. I ran it with 2.3.5. Use python -V to check the version. There’s two methods to run it.
With Prompts
1: Be prompted to push the Enter key to continue at each major step. Nice for the first time.
python wp-upgrade.py
Example output:
python ../src/wp-upgrade/wp-upgrade.py
Current WordPress Version: '2.5'
Newest WordPress Version: 2.6.1
Downloading wordpress-2.6.1.tar.gz ...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Create working wordpress directory...
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
Update WordPress root contents...
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
'/tmp/tmprpJTKu/wordpress' -> 'wordpress.working'
wp-trackback.php, wp-config-sample.php, wp-settings.php, wp-rss2.php, readme.html, index.php, wp-links-opml.php, wp-pass.php, wp-feed.php, wp-register.php, wp-rdf.php, wp-rss.php, wp-commentsrss2.php, license.txt, wp-comments-post.php, wp-blog-header.php, wp-load.php, wp-mail.php, wp-atom.php, wp-cron.php, wp-app.php, xmlrpc.php, wp-login.php,
Replace wp-admin and wp-includes...
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
Update default themes and plugins...
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
'/tmp/tmprpJTKu/wordpress/wp-content' -> 'wordpress.working/wp-content'
index.php,
'/tmp/tmprpJTKu/wordpress/wp-content/plugins' -> 'wordpress.working/wp-content/plugins'
akismet, hello.php,
'/tmp/tmprpJTKu/wordpress/wp-content/themes' -> 'wordpress.working/wp-content/themes'
default, classic,
Backup original, Rename working....
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
### VISIT 'http://stevenbrown.ca/blog/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php' in your browser. ###
After that, you're All Done!
Go re-enable all your plugins and make sure everything works.
If you need to, you can always roll back by renaming the backup to 'wordpress'.
[[Press Enter to Continue]]
Without Prompts
2. Do everything without a prompt. Do this by passing the -q option. The -q is for quiet and prints the same messages, but doesn’t wait for the user to press Enter. Blasts through the whole upgrade in one step.
python wp-upgrade.py -q
Example output would be the same as the above, minus the “[[Push Enter to Continue]]” bits.
What’s it do?
If you look at the above output, which is from my own site, you can see what it does. It will compare your installed wordpress version and to the latest available from http://www.wordpress.org. If your version is older, it will download the new one, extract it, perform the appropriate steps to update the old one. Note that the default themes and plugins will be overwritten, which is fine as long as you didn’t customize them. After it’s done, your wordpress directory should be up-to-date (you just have to visit the upgrade page), and you should have a wordpress 2.5 backup containing the directory as it was before running the script (and 2.5 would be the appropriate version). Also, there’s two variables you will (probably) want to customize: wpsite and wpdir. That’s it, basically.
I used to use a script to copy my files from my digital camera memory card to my computer. Since recent Ubuntu releases use gnome-volume-manager to automatically prompt you with a Photo Import dialog when you insert your memory card, I never bothered using my script.
If it was just a memory card over USB (as opposed to a digital camera over USB), then all this would do is open the memory card’s DCIM folder in gthumb and you would have to manually copy the files over. This has irritated me for a while, because I wanted the process to be as automated as possible. So… I spent most of the night battling Bash and playing with Zenity to create a new script. Behold!
Once installed, after you click Import Photos, you should get this screen to select the destination forlder.
Once you’ve done that, it should jump straight to copying the files.
When it’s finished, it will ask you if you want to browse the fresh files with your favourite photo program, which you set in the script.
Clicking OK will open the destination directory in your program of choice (gthumb, by default). Clicking Cancel will put a notification in the notification area with a bubble saying where the photos were copied to.
That’s it!
My old script also used jhead to rename the files according to date in the EXIF data, but I didn’t want to create a dependency on jhead. Maybe I’ll add that later, as an option.
Make sure you have executable permissions on it. chmod +x import-photos
Go to gnome-volume-properties and change the command for Digital Camera from gnome-volume-manager-gthumb %h
to the path to the import-photos script with the same parameter ~/bin/import-photos %h
In Ubuntu, you can access this window with:
System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media:
You should be done. 🙂
Guess I’d better study for my math midterm, now. 🙁
Update (2006/06/06):
Looks like this issue (lack of USB mass storage support in gphoto2) can be resolved simply by using bleeding-edge libgphoto2 package in Dapper. *gasp!*Davyd has built some packages and reports success. (Too bad I read his entry after writing the script….) Actually, I’m not sure I won’t continue using this script; it has some advantages. Maybe.
The first thing I want to do with pictures on my memory card is get them off of the memory card! I don’t need to see them, I’ll browse and edit them locally – it’s faster. The script currently copies all .jpg, .avi, .mov, and .mpg files found in the DCIM folder (and subfolders). As soon as the script has finished, I can unmount my memory card and plug it back into my camera, where it belongs. I don’t have to copy movie files in a seperate step. I will definitely try out the packages when I get a bit of time, though, because I honestly don’t know what I’m missing. Does it gphoto2 copy .avi files?
Regardless, it was a good experience writing it. 🙂
