171
votes
Accepted
Creating diagrams in ASCII
asciio
I've used asciio for several years. Many of the diagrams on this site I've created using asciio.
example
vncviewer .-,( ),-.
__ _ .-( )-. ...
slm♦
- 346k
72
votes
Accepted
What is the ^M character called?
It is known as carriage return.
If you're using vim you can enter insert mode and type CTRL-v CTRL-m. That ^M is the keyboard equivalent to \r.
Inserting 0x0D in a hex editor will do the task.
...
- 36.8k
51
votes
Does vi silently add a newline (LF) at the end of file?
POSIX requires this behavior, so it's not in any way unusual.
From the POSIX vi manual:
INPUT FILES
See the INPUT FILES section of the ex command for a description of the input files supported by the ...
- 1,836
44
votes
Converting a UTF-8 file to ASCII (best-effort)
This will work for some things:
iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT
echo ĥéĺłœ π | iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT returns helloe ?. Any characters that iconv doesn’t know how to convert will be ...
- 867
34
votes
Accepted
Is there a convenient way to classify files as "binary" or "text"?
If you ask file for just the mime-type you'll get many different ones like text/x-shellscript, and application/x-executable etc, but I imagine if you just check for the "text" part you should get good ...
- 45.3k
33
votes
Creating diagrams in ASCII
Have a look at artist-mode or picture-mode for Emacs (see also this screencast). You might also want to check out ditaa.
- 3,345
32
votes
Accepted
Does vi silently add a newline (LF) at the end of file?
This is the expected vi behavior.
Your file has an incomplete last line so strictly speaking (i.e. according to the POSIX standard), it is not a text file but a binary file.
vi which is a text file ...
- 58.2k
30
votes
Accepted
What conditions must be met for a file to be a text file as defined by POSIX?
Must a text file be a regular file? In the above excerpt it does not explicitly say the file must be a regular file
No; the excerpt even specifically notes standard input as a potential text file. ...
- 70.7k
29
votes
Creating diagrams in ASCII
I found another answer; I am not sure it is fully usable, but remember that GNU roff (groff) has a processor for the Pic language as well as an ascii postprocessor; thus you may have a try at ...
- 1,105
28
votes
Accepted
How does the file command distinguish text and LaTeX files?
The file type recognition is driven by so-called magic
patterns. The magic file for analyzing
TeX
family source code contains a number of macro names that cause
a file to be classified as LaTeX. Each ...
- 1,602
26
votes
Is there a convenient way to classify files as "binary" or "text"?
Another approach would be to use isutf8 from the moreutils collection.
It exits with 0 if the file is valid UTF-8 or ASCII, or short circuits, prints an error message (silence with -q) and exits with ...
- 361
23
votes
Creating diagrams in ASCII
Maybe you will be interested in graph-easy.
Example:
echo "[ Bonn ] -- car --> [ Berlin ], [ Ulm ]" | graph-easy
produces:
+--------+ car +-----+
| Bonn | -----> | Ulm |
+...
- 1,105
20
votes
Open a text file in a terminal and auto-refresh it whenever it is changed
tail -f /var/log/syslog
Shows the syslog updates as they are added to the file.
- 201
18
votes
Accepted
Converting a UTF-8 file to ASCII (best-effort)
konwert utf8-ascii
It will do best-effort conversion, depending on the conversion tables. If you know approximately the input language, there are language specific filters giving better results, e.g.
...
- 1,763
18
votes
Is there a convenient way to classify files as "binary" or "text"?
If you like the heuristic used by GNU grep, you could use it:
isbinary() {
LC_MESSAGES=C grep -Hm1 '^' < "${1-$REPLY}" | grep -q '^Binary'
}
It searches for NUL bytes in the first buffer read ...
- 471k
17
votes
Accepted
What does $0=$1 mean in awk?
It's not really $0=$1; think of it more like
$0 = ($1" "$1*$2" "$3*$4)
So
$0=$1" "$1*$2" "$3*$4
assigns the result of string concatenation $1" "$1*$2" "$3*$4 to variable $0 and performs the ...
- 72.4k
15
votes
Accepted
Filter output of command by color
Switching the color is done through escape sequences embedded in the text. Invariably, programs issue ANSI escape sequences, because that's what virtually all terminals support nowadays.
The escape ...
15
votes
Why does this grep statement do the opposite of what I expect?
From GNU grep manual:
\<
Match the empty string at the beginning of word.
\>
Match the empty string at the end of word.
This is also relevant [emphasis mine]:
-w
--word-regexp
Select only ...
- 15.3k
15
votes
Accepted
How to search for multiline text files containing a set of words (e.g., AAA & (BBB | CCC) & ~DD)?
Your solution is pretty legible for the task, in my opinion. However, it's slow, because it spawns 3 processes per file. I reckon Awk is better suited here because it will allow to read a whole batch ...
- 17.4k
14
votes
Possible to view two text files side by side (read only)?
The less command by itself cannot do any diff'ing. You can use the diff -y command to show the diff of 2 files side-by-side and then pipe that into less however.
Method #1 - using diff + less
This ...
slm♦
- 346k
13
votes
Existing command line text on screen to file? (non-graphical Linux)
Did you consider the screendump command?
- 8,596
12
votes
Finding all "Non-Binary" files
The accepted answer didn't find all of them for me. Here is an example using grep's -I to ignore binaries, and ignoring all hidden files...
find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -exec grep -Il '.' {} \; ...
- 547
12
votes
md5sum command binary and text mode
On GNU/Linux, the two modes always produce same result
Yes, explicitly. From man md5sum:
Note: There is no difference between binary and text mode option on [sic] GNU system.
This is from the ...
- 82.7k
12
votes
Format output to a specific line length
Use fold as follows:
fold -s -w80 file
This will only split at whitespace (-s), using a line width of 80 characters (-w80). So it does exactly the same as the fmt solutions, but it also allows to ...
- 728
12
votes
Accepted
display filename followed by content without interaction
If the output from more is acceptable as it is, just pipe it through cat:
more * | cat
That will do away with the "more" prompts.
Or you can get a bit more control over the display using printf in ...
- 75.4k
11
votes
Accepted
Format output to a specific line length
Use fmt instead:
fmt --width=80 file
From man fmt:
-w, --width=WIDTH
maximum line width (default of 75 columns)
- 144k
11
votes
Accepted
Debian - How to change Terminal background colors
In your Terminal, klick Edit > Profile Preferences > Colors
See the Text and Background Color
Uncheck the Use colors from system theme
And set the Build-in schemes: to: Gray on black
- 1,371
10
votes
Is there something like a lorem ipsum generator?
found this at Bash One-Liners
tr -dc a-z1-4 </dev/urandom | tr 1-2 ' \n' | awk 'length==0 || length>50' | tr 3-4 ' ' | sed 's/^ *//' | cat -s | sed 's/ / /g' |fmt
must be limited by another ...
- 217
10
votes
add filename as text in the corner of an image file
mogrify does batch processing so you could use something like this (change the font, size, color, position etc as per your taste):
mogrify -font Liberation-Sans -fill white -undercolor '#00000080' \
-...
- 73.4k
10
votes
Earliest viewer for viewing .json files?
jq is a json processor (like sed for json) which can also be used to pretty-print json documents.
cat yourfile.json | jq
- 313
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible