More Command Line Magic

Wow, I was looking around for a way to quickly convert my ls -al listing into octal ’0774′ permission display. I found a really neat awk script that does just this here:
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/newbie/21722-command-shows-me-permissions-file-octal.html#post371256

it’s this:
ls -l | awk ‘{k=0;for(i=0;i<=8;i++)k+=((substr($1,i+2,1)~/[rwx]/)*2^(8-i));if(k)printf(“%0o “,k);print}’

to make it permanent, add this to your .profile:
alias l=”ls -la –color | awk ‘{k=0;for(i=0;i<=8;i++)k+=((substr(\$1,i+2,1)~/[rwx]/)*2^(8-i));if(k)printf(\” %0o \”,k);print}’”

Amazing One Line Script

I was stumbling around on the internet this morning and I found this awesome site… (http://www.centerkey.com/tree/)

This guy posted an amazing one line script that will graphically show your directory tree with a simple one line command:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

and that’s all!!! It works great!

Tutorial: Protect Folders In Windows

Sometimes we have folders and files that we don’t want anyone to be able to read… banking information, taxes, porn, lots of things.

I was thinking of this, when I decided to peek around the web to find anything that may help; and although i forget the site, i DID find something quite handy. (http://www.bukisa.com/articles/108657_remove-stored-passwords-and-hide-floder-with-recycle-bin)

Basically, it turns any named folder into the “recycle bin” by using the CLSID of the recycle bin.  Interesting Stuff!

Like normal, I created a batch script for those of you interested.(http://ejesconsulting.wordpress.com/scripts/hidefolder-bat/)

Bug: Visual Basic Scripting

I was developing a source code repository with revision tracking system in VBS for a client.

In this repository each revision would be incremented by 0.01 on each commit to the repository.

Kind of like CVS but much, much simpler.

So it turned out to be quite simple (the source is in my Scripts Library) but I found some strange activity in VBS when it comes to floating point math.

VBS has a function to convert a signed decimal string to a number so that you can perform mathematical functions on it.  “CSng(string)”  is the function.

So once you’ve converted a number from a string, then add 0.01 it should effectively add 0.01 to the last number.

So, lets consider this code:

Version=CSng("0.01")
WScript.Echo Version
Version=Version+0.01
WScript.Echo Version

What would you assume the ouput would be?  0.02 right?

WRONG!  VBS outputs “1.99999997764826E-02″.

VBS Can’t Do Math!