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KEYWORDS=spaces, filenames, wc, wyse, terminals, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 30 - Dated: Tue Dec 20 09:53:01 EST 2005




From the desk of David Clark

As the year draws to a close and Christmas is here, I would like to thank
all our customers, suppliers and readers of the DAVROM Newsletter for your
continued support. Without you all, DAVROM would not exist.

We are here over the Christmas/New Years break except for the standard
public holidays so our support doors/channels are open if you need us.

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               ## /   Merry Christmas From DAVROM   \ ##
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I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter.

David.M.Clark


UNIX Quote

The UNIX legacy is a set of simple and timeless tools that can take years
to master but which can perform seeming miracles in the hands of experienced
users. -- a Bellevue Linux Users Group member, 2005

Spaces in file names

With the increased use of UNIX/Linux servers as file and print servers over
the years I have found some slight hick-ups when doing UNIX/Linux command line
based file manipulation of the files created by MS applications. The
hick-up is to do with using blank spaces (produced by your keyboard space
key) in file names - and for that matter, directory names.

Traditionally from the UNIX perspective and even from the days of MSDOS
(or CP/M if you remember back that far), spaces have always been used as
the command line IFS (internal field seperator) - so why change?

When using commands like "mv", "cp" and "ls" you can use the "\", "*" and
quote characters to get around command line file manipulation on file names
that have spaces, or if you are using the bash shell you can just use the
tab key to use file name completion - and on some versions of UNIX the ksh
will do the same file name completion with the Escape key.

But rather than have to go through the many tricks to get around this, I
have always tried to use the "_" character when creating new files - call
it a discipline if you like. So an example file name called:

2005 my budget.xls

becomes

2005_my_budget.xls

Viva the non-space character file names.


EMO version 1.1

We have recently released version 1.1 of our EMO product (Electronic Mail
Organiser) and have started to roll it out to existing owners of the 1.0
version free of charge.

We have added some slight enhancements based on customer feedback (oh the
mighty wish list) and implemented PHP in place of CGI script.

You can view a demo of the product at:

http://www.davrom.com/emodemo


Wyse Terminals

We have recently brought in 10-12 Wyse 60 terminals and I still have to
go through them all to see which ones are still working - so if you are
interested in obtaining any, please let us know.

Given the age of the terminals no warranty can be offered but at least
they should work for some time to come given the legacy reliability -
you'd be amazed where I have seen dumb terminals deployed.

If you have any old Wyse terminals around the place, please let us know
as we tend to still get enquiries for them.


Tech Tip


You sometimes need to know how many files are in a directory for various
reasons so here are some quick command line examples of doing calcs
regarding directory files contents.

ls -l /tmp | wc -l

This will return the number of lines in the /tmp directory. This will
equate to the number of files and/or directories in the /tmp directory.
You must deduct 1 off the final figure as ls will also include the
"total" in its header if it finds files there.

NUMFILES=`ls -l /tmp | wc -l`
echo $NUMFILES

This takes the value of the "wc -l" and puts it into a variable called
NUMFILES. Remember that if NUMFILES has a value of 1, then there are no
files or directories under /tmp.

ls -l /tmp/s* | wc -l

This will show you the number of files that start with the letter "s" -
you do not need to allow for the "total" when output when specifying set
wildcard ("*") patterns as it is not displayed.


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