Linux stuff

Unlock mozilla thunderbird/firefox

Your favorite browser/mail client is locked? The same stupid window keeps opening, saying 'profile already in use'? Unlock your program in three steps (replace thunderbird by firefox if necessary):

1. read your mozilla profile configuration file :

2. vi $home/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiles.ini
   

3. look what is your default profile path :

4. [General]
   StartWithLastProfile=0
   
   [Profile0]
   Name=default
   IsRelative=1
   Path=1marg9sa.default
   Default=1
   

5. delete the corresponding lock file :

6. rm $home/.mozilla-thunderbird/1marg9sa.default/lock
   

Text editor

The vim text editor is fast and highly configurable. C, html, php and perl code can be conveniently written with perfect syntax highlighting extremely quickly.

html-php clean-up/verifying tool

This tool was used to clean-up and indent the 'error-free' html code of these web-pages.

example :

• indent file and print in stdout:

  tidy -indent <html_file>
  

• indent file in place:

  tidy -indent -m <html_file>
  

Video player/encoder

mplayer

• to play a file :

  mplayer <video_file>
  

• to encode a file in mpeg4 format with mp3 sound at 3000Kb/s:

  mencoder <video_file_in> -oac lavc -ovc lavc \
  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=3000:acodec=mp3:abitrate=200 \
  -o <video_file_out>
  

Find a file containing a given string

find <folder> -name "*.<suffix>" | xargs grep <string> 

Edit file in place with sed

sed 's/pattern1/pattern2/g' <file>

Example : give me all the .eps files included in the .tex files in this directory

egrep "\.eps" *.tex | sed -e "s/.*{\(\/.*\.eps\)}.*/\1/g"

Crop eps files with white borders (matlab)

Thanks ImageMagick !! It has an embeded autocrop function!

mogrify -density 150 +antialiasing -crop 0x0 <eps_filename>

Convert eps files to high quality png files

Thanks ImageMagick, again. With -density argument, the dpi resolution can be adjusted at will.

convert -density 150 <eps_filename> <png_filename>

Load another keyboard map for console

Example : under debian, give me the swiss french qwertz keymap !.

loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwertz/fr_CH.kmap.gz