Software

Over the years I’ve written a bunch of software; most of it is small utilities to make shell programming easier or solve a specific problem I’ve had. I don’t know how useful any of this will be to other people, but in the best Free/Open Source Software spirit I can manage, I’m making it available. If you find it useful, great; if not, well, at least no one will accuse me of hoarding my work.

I don’t entirely agree with the GNU Public License, so I’ve come up with a license of my own; I think you’ll find it quite reasonable.

Now then, on to the software …

README

A brief overview of this collection of tools.

INSTALL

The INSTALL file that describes how to build and install these programs.

BACKGROUND

A brief history and “justification” of my tools.

addrtool

Perform common IP address/CIDR/netmask calculations.

baseconv

Convert integers between bases 2, 8, 10, 16, 32, 62, and 64.

dateops

Perform simple date operations like yesterday, tomorrow, 5 days in the future, etc.

dseq

Print sequences of dates.

edate

POSIX date(1), with extensions (single-digit day, day suffix, epoch seconds, microseconds, and operating on a specified date) and deletions (can’t be used to set the system date), and all done with 100% POSIX-compliant library calls.

getman

Used with hexify (see below).

hd

Display a file in hexadecimal and ASCII.

hexify

Embed plain ASCII man pages inside a C program.

isprint

Check a file for “unprintable” characters.

lstat

A command-line interface to the lstat(2) system call, with lots of options.

mkstemp

A command-line interface to the mkstemp(3) library call.

nthday

Print a selected day of the month.

note

A very simple program for managing notes to myself.

numcmp

Used in shell programming to compare two numbers (because sometimes the shell makes it difficult to deal with negative numbers, and floating point numbers are right out).

openCreatExcl

A command-line interface to the open(2) system call, with flags set to O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_EXCL.

postoffice

A small system for processing email messages after they have been delivered.

st

A very simple program for compiling and printing status reports.

strcmp
strncmp

A command-line interface to the strcmp(3) and strncmp(3) library calls (because neither POSIX test(1) nor sh(1) can do this.

All the software is collected in a single gzipped tar file. Here’s an abbreviated revision history of that file:

I presented some of this software at the December 2009 BBLISA meeting. My slides (PowerPoint and PDF) give more information about a subset of my tools (in particular, note and st).