Interesting Programs and Other Bits

Home, 2010-02-04

Lesser Known Interesting Programs for UNIX

Mac stuff

Lesser Known Interesting Programs for UNIX

Aptconvert command-line tool that can be used to convert the APT format to HTML, XHTML, PDF, PostScript, (MS Word loadable) RTF, DocBook SGML and DocBook XML. The APT format (Almost Plain Text) is a simple markup language (like HTML) than can be used to write simple article-like documents (like HTML). Unlike HTML, APT uses as few markup as possible to express the structure of the document. Instead, APT uses paragraph indentation (these webpages are generated using Aptconvert). [http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html]
ccache ccache is a compiler cache. It acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations.[http://ccache.samba.org/]
dbacl digramic Bayesian classifier easy to use Bayesian filter [http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/].
dcfldd enhanced GNU dd, the killer feature for me is the progress meter [http://dcfldd.sourceforge.net/].
ddrescue GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. [http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/].
exiv2 Exiv2 is a C++ library and a command line utility to manage image metadata. [[http://www.exiv2.org]].
gmemusage
mimms download mms:// sources [http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mimms/].
most If less is more than more, most is more than less. [http://www.jedsoft.org/most/]
htop easier to read variant of top [http://htop.sourceforge.net/].
pho view and annotate multiple images [http://www.shallowsky.com/software/pho/]. (I now mostly use gqview.)
photorec cross platform file recovery program, great to recover deleted photos from flash media [http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec].
QEmacs very small, very fast emacs-like editor. I use it for small edits on less powerfull machines (vi-alternative for emacs-users). It supports vertical splits [http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemacs/]. I also use it instead of GNU Emacs on large log-filesm as GNU Emacs cannot handle large files (for 21 it is 128MB on 32bit platforms).
shfs a Linux kernel module which allows you to mount remote filesystems using a ssh connection.[http://shfs.sourceforge.net/]. (I have now changed to the FUSE alternative sshfs (http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html).)
smartmontools disk health monitoring http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools
Source-Navigator http://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/. GUI for source code navigation, it is dated but still a very useful tool.
zsh maybe the best shell for interactive work. Bash might provide most of the functionality nowaday. I love the right prompt and the tab-expansion of globbing.

Mac stuff

Desktop Manager virtual desktop manager. There is no version for Intel macs.
SMARTReporter tool that polls the status of disks: http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/

Emacs Stuff

calc-mode HP rpn-style calc, just m-x calc: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AdvancedDeskCalculator