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March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

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Article Archive for September 2021

Plundering Facebook Photo Albums

September 30, 2021 – 11:42 am
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Let’s imagine you need to download all the photos in a Facebook photo album. It can be a public album, a friend’s, or even your own. Sure, you can do this manually, but you probably …

Scraping a Web Page in Bash

September 23, 2021 – 11:33 am
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Just a scripting exercise because I need to do something important, but I am procrastinating. The idea is simple: grab some URL with text containing somewhat structured data and convert it into a spreadsheet. I …

Generating Random Text Files for Testing

September 16, 2021 – 11:31 am
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Sometimes you need dummy folder structures populated with random data for testing your various scripts and processes – backups, file transfers, encryption, compression, etc. Every time I need something like this, I end up writing …

Finding Cron Jobs

September 9, 2021 – 11:28 am
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Cron is an indispensable tool for system administration. The difficulties in working with cron in a large environment stem from its decentralized nature. Cron jobs multiply like rabbits, and keeping track of them is not …

Renaming Files with exiftool

September 2, 2021 – 11:25 am
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Recently I exported a whole bunch of files from Lightroom to a NAS share and filenames like 2E570434-67B7E0489CA2-39354-000017CF24DD8ACD.jpg are not very informative. It would’ve been nice if the filename contained some useful information like date, …