Complete software directory

To prevent disappointments, I have to state right away that almost 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

Entries without any icon are usually just very small scripts you can read through quickly and form your own opinion about.

Hardware related

• VHDocL, a documentation utility for designs coded in the hardware description language VHDL. More info...

Sound related

• sndsys, a powerful audio stream processing toolkit. More info...
• printscales.pl prints musical scales for practicing in PDF format. Download.
• mksam generates long loopable samples from short ones. Download.
• alsacap serves to list ALSA devices and explore their possible configuration parameters. Download. More...
• maxwav substitutes the maximum length in the header of a piped .wav file to allow playing a .wav file from a pipe. Download.
• The Perl script nametracks.pl comfortably names ripped audio tracks after enumerated song titles.
• fifo, a first-in-first-out buffer which reads from stdin and writes to stdout. Originally created 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.

Web spidering and information retrieval

• wfind is a powerful web search spider. More info...
• The Perl script refdb-sqlite accesses an SQLite databases with tags for URLs and local files.
• The Perl script mailbackup allows you to back up data in a mail account.
• Several Perl scripts that operate on HTML files: For viewing HTML with proper indentation, viewing differences (uses HTML::Diff), deleting certain tags by path, and removing style and other non-content tags that make web pages bulky.

Scientific computing

• histo.c computes histograms of numeric data in plain text files, optionally taking the difference between successive values first.
• The octave script binhist computes histograms of binary data files.
• fft (also an octave script) computes the Fourier transform of textual numeric data, optionally splitting the input file into blocks.
• nsum prints sums and statistics of files containing numbers in plain text. More info...
• movavg.pl computes a moving average of series data in plain text files.
• paragraph.pl selects a paragraph out of several in a text file, which is very useful for files containing data sets formatted for gnuplot.
• 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.

File system helpers

• mkcd: A bash shell function for creating a directory and descending into it in one go.
• The reverse: rmcd, a bash shell function for leaving an empty directory and removing it.
• 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.
• This enhanced version of Perl rename supports numbering files. Download. More info...
• This Perl script detects gaps in series of files with names containing sequential numbers, such as dates or indexes of sections or instalments. Multiple numbers are allowed; missing files at the start or end of a sequence cannot be detected.
• 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 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.
• The shell script cscript compiles a single-source C program and executes it. The related mkcscript creates a template cscript script. Together they allow quickly writing small C programs that can be executed like interpreter scripts.

Other

• 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.
• 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 Perl script repodiff compares files in different git commits by their SHA1 hashes, possibly between unrelated repositories. Useful when you have different repositories sharing some files.
• The C program xobsdview is a clone of xosview for OpenBSD, which that program no longer supports.

Forks and patches

• Enhancements for the links browser. More info...
• Personal modifications of the privoxy privacy proxy. More info...
• A patch for hexedit by Pascal Rigaux for searches with bit mask and alignment. More info...
• A path for correct base conversion in Gnu bc. More info...

External 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

TOS / Impressum