Computer Productivity Hacks
Revision as of 20:16, 1 March 2016 by Dave (talk | contribs) (→Rename Files & Folders: Massive File Renamer + How can I mass rename files? + Bulk Rename Command + Ant Renamer + How to Write a Batch File)
Command Line
- Sometimes referred to as a command script, a command language is a language used for executing a series of commands that would otherwise be executed at the prompt. A good example of a command language is Microsoft Windows batch files. Although command languages are useful for executing a series of commands, their functionality is limited to what is available at the command line which can make them easier to learn.
- Quick super fast course in using the command line. It is intended to be done rapidly in about a day or two, and not meant to teach you advanced shell usage.
- Mounting shared drives and connecting to remote resources is something you can easily do from the Windows GUI. With our quick guide to the command prompt, however, you can more easily automate large tasks.
Bash & Linux Commands
- Got a bunch of .tar.gz files you want to unpack onto a server at the same time. Then this tutorial is for you.
WGET
- Using PowerShell (Among other useful options listed at this resource.):
- WinWGet is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for Wget. It is FREE. It will keep track of your downloads - add, clone, edit, delete jobs.
- Wget for Windows
- WGET for Windows (win32) (Windows executable file.)
- GNU Wget is a free network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, thus enabling work in the background, after having logged off.
- Say you want to backup your blog or create a local copy of an entire directory of a web site for archiving or reading later. The command:
wget -m http://website.tld
- Tips for mirroring specific directories, update only changed files, etc.
- cliget (A Firefox add-on.)
- Download files using curl or wget. This addon generates curl/wget commands that emulate the request as though it's coming from your browser allowing you to download protected files directly to a separate machine (e.g. server).
Windows Command Line
- Clink: Powerful Bash-style command line editing for cmd.exe
- Overview: Clink combines the native Windows shell cmd.exe with the powerful command line editing features of the GNU Readline library, which provides rich completion, history, and line-editing capabilities. Readline is best known for its use in the well-known Unix shell Bash, the standard shell for Mac OS X and many Linux distributions.
- Cmdlets are the heart-and-soul of Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's latest command shell/scripting language.
- Robocopy: A robust file copy command for the Windows command line.
- Each command is linked to more info about the particular command.
- The xcopy command is a Command Prompt command used to copy one or more files and/or folders from one location to another location.
- This question is answered in numerous ways. Many of the answers point to useful utilities to accomplish find-and-replace.
Generate File List
- Example:
C:\Users\me\Downloads\MyFolder> dir /b > filelist.txt
- (The text in orange shows the command used once you've navigated into the directory from which you want to generate the list of file names.)
- This tutorial contains several working answers for using Windows PowerShell to list files and folders.
- Works with cmd.exe, but doesn't seem to work with Windows PowerShell.
Data Analysis Tools
Moved content to Data Analysis.
Databases
- Includes Section: Copying Tables or Databases to Another Host:
- (You can) send the output of mysqldump directly over the network to the remote MySQL server. If you can connect to both servers from the host where source database resides, use this command (Make sure you have access on both the servers):
$ mysqldump -u root -p database_name \
:| mysql -h other-host.com database_name
- (You can) send the output of mysqldump directly over the network to the remote MySQL server. If you can connect to both servers from the host where source database resides, use this command (Make sure you have access on both the servers):
Educate Yourself
Also See: Data Analysis#Learn_Data_Science
Learn to Code
- The Best Websites to Learn Coding Online - Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration, Jan 12 2015
- The Learn to Code movement has picked up momentum worldwide and that is actually a good thing as even basic programming skills can have a major impact. If you can teach yourself how to write code, you gain a competitive edge over your peers, you can think more algorithmically and thus can tackle problems more efficiently.
- New Year’s Resolution: Learn to Code - by Lena Groeger, ProPublica, Dec. 19, 2012, 2:51 p.m.
- Lena Groeger: When I started learning to code, I was amazed by how much was out there: introductory videos, explanatory blog posts, tips and tricks and step-by-step guides. If you're a journalist who wants to make a news app or a student interested in learning to code, you have plenty of paths to choose from.
Multiple Codes
- Learn to code while building a project. Free online courses include: HTML & CSS; jQuery; JavaScript; PHP; Python; Ruby; Web Projects; APIs
D3.js
- d3Vienno features a series of video tutorials, each about 10-12 minutes long, on using D3.js.
- D3 Tools
- A Chrome-specific bookmarklet that extracts SVG nodes and accompanying styles from an HTML document and downloads them as an SVG file—A file which you could open and edit in Adobe Illustrator, for instance. Because SVGs are resolution independent, it’s great for when you want to use web technologies to create documents that are meant to be printed (like, maybe on newsprint). It was created with d3.js in mind, but it should work fine no matter how you choose to generate your SVG.
R
- Learn R & Become a Data Analyst
SQL
- Learn how to use SQL to store, query, and manipulate data. SQL is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data in a relational database, and is used by a huge number of apps and organizations.
- This book will teach you the 80% of SQL you probably need to use it effectively, and will mix in concepts in data modeling at the same time. If you've been fumbling around building web, desktop, or mobile applications because you don't know SQL, then this book is for you. It is written for people with no prior database, programming, or SQL knowledge, but knowing at least one programming language will help.
File Transfer
File Transfer Clients for Windows Mac
- Lists several clients recommended for interoperating with OpenSSH from Mac OS machines. Note that Mac OS X includes OpenSSH by default.
- SSH Clients for Windows, Mac, and Unix
- Libre FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 & OpenStack Swift browser for Mac and Windows.
Folder & File Compression
- Example:
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\"
- To compress a folder without using any particular compression software.
Maintenance
Dual Boot
Boot Disks
- Rufus is an utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.
Network Issues
- Post reviews various "fixes" found all over the web, and which "fix" actually worked for the post's author.
- Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) in Windows just doesn’t seem to figure out the MTU for a given path. So Windows uses the default. For the most part this doesn’t affect anyone. But failure of PMTUD will result in some websites not loading correctly, having trouble connecting to normally reliable online services and general Internet weirdness.
Print Screen / Screen Grabs / Screen Shots
- In Microsoft Windows, pressing
Prt Scr
will capture the entire screen, while pressing theAlt
key in combination withPrt Scr
will capture the currently selected window.
- iOS
- OneShot for iOS lets you highlight screenshots of text and share them to Twitter.
- Linux (Ubuntu)
- Mac OS
- Windows
Regular Expressions
Moved content to Data Analysis.
Rename Files & Folders
- To rename files in bulk more efficiently, you can either learn some complex shell scripting language (SED, AWK, Perl) or switch to something more simple--a spreadsheet.
Bulk Rename Files
- Bulk Rename Utility - GUI Interface (Windows only.)
- Bulk Rename Command - non-GUI, CMD Interface (Windows only.)
- Massive File Renamer: Confused by Bulk Rename Utility? Take a look at Massive File Renamer instead. Massive File Renamer is simpler to use, and is available in Linux, Mac and Windows versions.
Rename List of Files With Batch File
- A batch file contains a series of DOS commands, and is commonly written to automate frequently performed tasks. Instead of typing the same commands over and over, you can simply double-click the batch file. Writing a batch file is easier than it looks; the difficult part is making sure that everything happens in the right order. Well-made batch files can save you a lot of time over the long run, especially if you deal in repetitive tasks.
It's easy to rename a group of files by running a batch file (file.bat), configured something like this:
rename "Old-File_001.jpg" "New-File_001.jpg" rename "Old-File_002.jpg" "New-File_002.jpg" rename "Old-File_003.jpg" "New-File_003.jpg"
Using Windows or DOS, just create your batch file using the format shown above, and then double-click it to rename the files in the directory containing both your file.bat and files with the same names as those found in the "Old-File" (left) column of your file.bat file.
- See this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3808074
- For help with using Regular Expressions in text file, see this answer: Regular expresion in text editor (sic)
Rename Multiple Folders / Directories With Batch File
- There are a couple of pretty good answers to this question; answers that explain how the regular expression written into the .bat file actually works.
Text Editors
Text Extraction
Moved content to Data Analysis.
Investigative Reporting; Journalism; General Research
Moved content to Journalism Tools.
See Also
References
- Career Portfolio Tips
- Computer Productivity Hacks
- Data Analysis
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Journalism Tools
- Mobile Apps
- Office Productivity Hacks
- Social Networking Tips
- Spreadsheet Tricks
- Telecom Tips
- .US Locality Domains
- User:Dave/Admin Notes
- User:Dave/Web Hack Notes (Non-Wiki)
- User:Dave/Wikis In The Enterprise