If you are a developer or simply a command-line geek/fan, there are times where you type some documents using the command line, like for README's or for documentation. It is also important to have a very good writing in English if you wish to distribute those files.

Hunspell can help you with spell-checking. It is based on MySpell and contains a nice terminal interface to spell-check your files.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

scanerrlog offers the possibility to generate a summary or report about Apache errors and sort them depending on how frequent they are.

To install it (for Ubuntu users):

sudo apt-get install scanerrlog

or use Synaptic and search for scanerrlog.

It's written in Python, and it is very easy to use it. (type 'man scanerrlog' in a terminal to see the manual page)

I tested it with Apache2 log files using the following command:

scanerrlog -f text -o /tmp/log.txt /var/log/apache2/*.log

• -f : format (text, pdf, html, xml)
• -o : output file
• args : log files

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

I was on #ubuntu-fr trying to help people, and a person talked about irssi-notify script. It's a irssi script written in perl, that when there is message with your name in it (even highlights should work too), a notification pops-up (using the ubuntu notification system).

That's very helpful. Plus it says the channel! Here's a screenshot:

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

I recently scheduled some backup tasks on my VPS using backup-manager which is a neat program for this job. Everything is fine for that.
Then I wanted to set up a cron on my home computer to download the backup archives everyday. This wasn't as easy as it sounded at first.
You might even get those errors:

Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied (publickey,password).
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(635) [receiver=3.0.3]

I need to connect to my VPS using a SSH key that is protected by a passphrase (password). This ssh key is added to my ssh agent (at login time).

The main problem is that cron is run using a restricted environment, meaning it doesn't give environment variables like SSH_AUTH_SOCK.
This variable is needed by the ssh client in order to communicate with the ssh agent that will provide the information on the ssh key.

Here's a workaround for it. It's a quite secure way to fix this.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

I'm posting here the .vimrc I use for both my desktop computer and my server. It works through SSH too!
It gives the following features to vim:

• Syntax coloring
• Dark background every time
• Highlight search
• Case insensitive search
• Autoindent
• Mouse support (for selecting text, moving cursor)
• Safe Pasting (Push F2 to activate/deactivate)
• Always shows current line number

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

On huge project, like Firefox, Seamonkey, Iceweasel, Glib,  etc..., compile time can take a very, very long time. If you are a proud owner of a dual-core or multi-core processor, you can reduce the compile by increase the number of simultaneous jobs that make can have.

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

If you wish to print (or see) a preview of your installed fonts under linux. I found this command myself:

Here is the All-in-One command, copy and paste all this in a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):

1
2

(echo '<html><body>' && (fc-list | sed 's/\(.*\):.*/<font face="\1">\1<\/font><br>/') && echo '</body></html>') > fonts.html
firefox fonts.html

Then Hit Enter.

This should open firefox and open fonts.html, by itself.

Otherwise, go to your user's directory and open fonts.html yourself.

© 2008 - 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

Tired of using the Find command? want something faster? Use locate!!! It's easy to use.

locate myfile

Would give you all the files found since last indexing.

Locate uses a database containing file indexes. That's why it is very fast to find files, that's the good point of this system. The bad point is that the database is not updated everytime you create/move/delete a file. But it's easy to force updating.
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© 2008 - 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.