Here are some of my UNIX utilities, mostly scripts, which you may find useful for various chores. Also check my notes on shells. After copying these scripts to your system, make them executable by using UNIX command:

• sets generates the union, intersection or set difference of two sets, where each set is a file and the elements of the set are the lines in the file.
• tarnewest GNU tars all files in a directory newer than the file TIMESTAMP and compress the tar file in anticipation of file transferring to another computer. If you have no TIMESTAMP file or the timestamp is inappropriate use
  touch -t MMDDhhmm TIMESTAMP first. The script may need to be modified slightly to point it to your system's GNU tar.
• openup is similar to
  chmod -R go+r dirname but unlike chmod it treat links, directories and executables correctly. openup recursively descends the given directory giving each file the same "group" and "other" read and execute permissions as those for the owner. It removes write permission, if any, for "other".
• Which is similar to Korn shell's "whence -p" and C-shell's "which" except Which lists all files on your PATH which match the given file pattern. An option exists to do the same for man entries using MANPATH. Where multiple files with the same name are found, the first one would be the command run by the shell.
• extension_change renames all files with given extension to ones with a new extension. Supply the old extension as the first argument, the new extension as the second, and the (old) filenames as the remaining arguments.
• kase renames files forcing all characters in the filenames to lowercase.
• Some trivial utilities for handling commands that require confirmation are:
  • yes which just prints endless y's. You might use this as follows:
    yes | rm -f dirnames when the rm command needs repeated confirmation to override protections.
  • n and y are dummy commands to catch extra y's or n's typed to some commands.
• 80 prints a ruler of length 80 characters.

Last update: 2009 January 21