Various software

I'm a big fan of Terminal.app on Mac OS X, and use it all the time. During the years, I've made little scripts in various languages (shell, Perl, Python) to perform certain tasks. This page contains some of those scripts, since they might be useful to others besides me ☺

mplayer-resume

mplayer-resume is a zsh-script which wraps mplayer to keep track of the current playback position in the moviefile. When you stop playing, the position is saved and the next time you open the same moviefile, playback will be resumed at the saved location. I use this script on my MythTV frontends (specifically, with the MythVideo plug-in).

unwebarchive

unwebarchive is a Perl-script to unpack .webarchive files written by Safari. A webarchive is a simple containerfile (in the form of a property list file, common to Mac OS X) which contains all (read: most) resources for a webpage to be able to browse that page offline.

lessopen

lessopen is a Perl-script to enable the less fileviewer to interpret a whole bunch of different fileformats. For instance, if you use it to view a .ZIP-file, you get to see the contents of that .ZIP-file.

To use this scripts, download it, save it somewhere (perhaps in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin), and edit your shells startupfile (usually ~/.bashrc) to include the following line:

export LESSOPEN=/usr/local/bin/lessopen

(assuming you saved it it /usr/local/bin).

Reload the said startupfile (source ~/.bashrc) and see the intelligence of less increase!

Tip: for most archivefiles (.ZIP, .TAR), you can view individual archivemembers by prepending ~FILENAME to the commandline. For instance, if you want to view the file README in the .ZIP-file somearchive.zip, use this:

less somearchive.zip~README

NB: lessopen depends on several external programs which aren't commonly installed on Mac OS X. If you find that for certain files lessopen doesn't function, this might be the cause.