Unix Daemons

        flasher is a portable Unix daemon that monitors specified files (e.g., a mail file or system log file) for changes and indicates the number of writes by flashing a keyboard LED. When the files have been read, the flashing stops. It currently works on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux and SCO Unix.

        Download flasher-1.3.tar.gz, or browse the source code.

Interchange Payment Modules

        Vend::Payment::Nova is an Interchange payment module to support Nova (myvirtualmerchant) payment processing.

        Download Nova.pm v1.01 here.

Unix Shell Tools

        base-convert is a shell script that converts its numeric argument from one base to another, depending on the name by which the script was invoked. For example:

      Convert binary 101010 to decimal:

          $ ./b2d 101011
          43

      Convert octal 755 to hexadecimal:

          $ ./o2h 755
          1ED

      The scripts can be pipelined:

          $ echo 101010 | ./b2o | ./o2h | ./h2d
          42

        Download base-convert-1.0.tar.gz, or browse the source code.

        loop prints to stdout a series of numbers from `start' to `end', with optional increment and zero-padded field width. Hex (-x) or octal (-o) output formats are available. Negative numbers are allowed, and a negative `increment' does the expected thing. For example:

          $ loop 1 3
          1
          2
          3

          $ loop 2 6 2
          2
          4
          6

          $ loop 2 10 2 2
          02
          04
          06
          08
          10

          $ # Create 10 test files, 'test01' through 'test10'
          $ for i in `loop 1 10 1 2`; do touch test$i; done

          $ loop -x -8 8 4 8
          FFFFFFF8
          FFFFFFFC
          00000000
          00000004
          00000008

          $ loop 4 0 -1
          4
          3
          2
          1
          0

        Download loop-1.0.tar.gz, or browse the source code.

Perl

        perl-D-win32.zip contains a Microsoft Windows binary of the 5.6.1 release of Perl. It differs from other Windows binary distributions of Perl in that it is built with -DDEBUGGING enabled. This allows you to use Perl's -D option to view all manner of interesting debugging information. See the perlrun section of the Perl documentation for full details.

        The distribution also includes the following CPAN extensions: PPM, libwin32, XML-Parser, Compress-Zlib, Archive-Tar, Digest-MD5, MIME-Base64, URI, HTML-Parser, libnet, libwww-perl, SOAP-Lite, File-CounterFile and Font-AFM.

        To install, simply unzip and add the 'perl-DDEBUGGING/bin' directory to your PATH. If 'c:\temp' does not exist, you will need to run the following command to configure PPM: 'ppm set build %TEMP%'.

        Download it here.

Windows Registry Modifications

Disclaimer: These tips work for us, but modify your Windows registry at your own risk!

        completion.reg will modify two values in your Windows 2000 or NT registry to enable command-line completion in the Command Prompt. See the Windows Tips section of our site for further information on how to use this Windows feature. Download it here.

        X-mouse.reg will modify a Windows registry entry to enable X-mouse (a.k.a. "focus follows mouse") behaviour. See the Windows Tips section of our site for further information on how to use this Windows feature. Download it here.