Suggestions for the GNOME Team //at 23:01 //by abe

Thanks to Erich Schubert’s blog posting on Planet Debian I became aware of the 2012 GNOME User Survey at Phoronix.

Like back in 2006 I still use some GNOME applications, so I do consider myself as “GNOME user” in the widest sense and hence I filled out that survey. Additionally I have to live with GNOME 3 as a system administrator of workstations, and that’s some kind of usage, too. ;-)

The last question in the survey was Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? — Sure I have. And since I tried to give constructive feedback instead of only ranting, here’s my answer to that question as I submitted it in the survey, too, just spiced up with some hyperlinks and highlighting:

Don’t try to change the users. Give the users more possibilities to change GNOME if they don’t agree with your own preferences and decisions. (The trend to castrate the user was already starting with GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 made that worse IMHO.)

If you really think that you need less configurability because some non-power-users are confused or challenged by too many choices, then please give the other users at least the chance to enable more configuration options. A very good example in that hindsight was Kazehakase (RIP) who offered several user interfaces (novice, intermediate and power user or such). The popular text-mode web browser Lynx does the same, too, btw.

GNOME lost me mostly with the change to GNOME 2. The switch from Galeon 1.2 to 1.3/2.0 was horrible and the later switch to Epiphany made things even worse on the browser side. My short trip to GNOME as desktop environment ended with moving back to FVWM (configurable without tons of clicking, especially after moving to some other computer) and for the browser I moved on to Kazehakase back then. Nowadays I’m living very well with Awesome and Ratpoison as window managers, Conkeror as web browser (which are all very configurable) and a few selected GNOME applications like Liferea (luckily still quite configurable despite I miss Gecko’s about:config since the switch to WebKit), GUCharmap and Gnumeric.

For people switching from Windows I nowadays recommend XFCE or maybe LXDE on low-end computers. I likely would recommend GNOME 2, too, if it still would exist. With regards to MATE I’m skeptical about its persistance and future, but I’m glad it exists as it solves a lot of problems and brings in just a few new ones. Cinnamon as well as SolusOS are based on the current GNOME libraries and are very likely the more persistent projects, but also very likely have the very same multi-head issues we’re all barfing about at work with Ubuntu Precise. (Heck, am I glad that I use Awesome at work, too, and all four screens work perfectly as they did with FVWM before.)

Thanks to Dirk Deimeke for his (German written) pointer to Marcus Moeller’s interview with Ikey Doherty (in German, too) about his Debian-/GNOME-based distribution SolusOS.

zutils: zcat and friends on Steroids //at 01:18 //by abe

I recently wrote about tools to handle archives conveniently. If you just have to handle compressed text files, there are some widely known shortcut commands to mimic common commands on files compressed with a specific compression format.

In Debian and derivatives, those tools are part of the according package for that compression utility, i.e. the zcat command is part of the gzip package and the xzfgrep command is part of the xz-utils package.

But despite this matrix is quite easy to remember, the situation has a few drawbacks:

• Those tools can only handle the format they’re written for (which btw. means that all xz-tools can also handle lzma-compressed files as lzma is xz’s predecessor)
• zcat and the other cat variants can’t even recognize non-compressed files and throw an error instead of just showing their contents.
• I always tend to think that lzcat and friends are for lzip-based compression as xzcat can handle lzma-compressed files anyway.

This is where the zutils project comes in: zutils provides the functionality of most of these utilities, too, but with one big difference: You don’t have to remember, think about or type which compression method has been used for your data, just use zcat, zcmp, zdiff, zgrep, zegrep, or zfgrep and it works — independently of what compression method has been used — if any — or if there are different compression types mixed in the parameters to the same command:

$ zfgrep foobar bla.txt fnord.gz hurz.xz quux.lz bar.lzma

Especially if you use logrotate and let logrotate compress old logs, it’s very comfortable that one command suffices to concatenate all the available logfiles, including the current uncompressed one:

$ zcat /var/log/syslog* | …

Additionally, zutils’ versions of these tools also support lzip-compressed files.

The zutils package is available in Debian starting with Wheezy and in Ubuntu since Oneiric. When being installed, it replaces the original z* utilities from the gzip package by diverting them away.

The only drawback so far is that there neither a zless nor a zmore utility from the zutils project, so zless bla.txt fnord.gz hurz.xz quux.lz bar.lzma will not work as expected even after installing zutils as it is still the one from the gzip package and hence it will show you just the first two files in plain text, but not the remaining ones.

deepgrep: grep nested archives with one command //at 02:00 //by abe

Several months ago, I wrote about grep everything and listed grep-like tools which can grep through compressed files or specific data formats. The blog posting sparked several magazine articles and talks by Frank Hofmann and me.

Frank recently noticed that we though missed one more or less mighty tool so far. We missed it, because it’s mostly unknown, undocumented and hidden behind a package name which doesn’t suggest a real recursive “grep everything”:

deepgrep

deepgrep is part of the Debian package strigi-utils, a package which contains utilities related to the KDE desktop search Strigi.

deepgrep especially eases the searching through tar balls, even nested ones, but can also search through zip files and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice documents (which are actually zip files).

deepgrep seems to support at least the following archive and compression formats:

• tar
• ar, and hence deb
• rpm (but not cpio)
• gzip/gz
• bzip2/bz2
• zip, and hence jar/war and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice documents
• MIME messages (i.e. files attached to e-mails)

A search in an archive which is deeply nested looks like this:

$ deepgrep bar foo.ar
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip/foo.tar.bz2/foo.txt.gz/foo.txt:foobar
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip/foo.tar.bz2/foo.txt.gz/foo.txt:bar

deepgrep though neither seems to support any LZMA based compression (lzma, xz, lzip, 7z), nor does it support lzop, rzip, compress (.Z suffix), cab, cpio, xar, or rar.

Further current drawbacks of deepgrep:

• Nearly no commandline options, especially none of the common grep options
• No man-page or other documentation
• Exit code not related to search results, you have to check the output to see if something has been found

deepfind

If you just need the file names of the files in nested archives, the package also contains the tool deepfind which does nothing else than to list all files and directories in a given set of archives or directories:

$ deepfind foo.ar
foo.ar
foo.ar/foo.tar
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip/foo.tar.bz2
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip/foo.tar.bz2/foo.txt.gz
foo.ar/foo.tar/foo.tar.gz/foo.zip/foo.tar.bz2/foo.txt.gz/foo.txt

As with deepgrep, deepfind does not implement any common options of it’s normal sister tool find.

[The following part has been added on 17-Nov-2012]

As with deepgrep, it also doesn’t seem to support any of the more modern or more exotic compression formats, i.e. it fails on modern debian binary packages which use xz compression on the data part:

deepfind xulrunner-18.0_18.0\~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/debian-binary
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz/triggers
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz/preinst
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz/md5sums
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz/postinst
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/control.tar.gz/control
xulrunner-18.0_18.0~a2+20121109042012-1_amd64.deb/data.tar.xz

[End of part added at 17-Nov-2012]

Dependencies

The package strigi-utils doesn’t pull in the complete Strigi framework (i.e. no daemon), just a few libraries (libstreams, libstreamanalyzer, and libclucene). On Wheezy it also pulls in some audio/video decoding libraries which may make some server administrators less happy.

Conclusion

Both tools are quite limited to some basic use cases, but can be worth a fortune if you have to work with nested archives. Nevertheless the claim in the Debian package description of strigi-utils that they’re “enhanced” versions of their well known counterparts is IMHO disproportionate.

Most of the missing features and documentation can be explained by the primary purpose of these tools: Being backend for desktop searches. I guess, there wasn’t much need for proper commandline usage yet. Until now. ;-)

42.zip

And yes, I was curious enough to let deepfind have a look at 42.zip (the one from SecurityFocus, unzip seems not able to unpack 42.zip from unforgettable.dk due a missing version compatibility) and since it just traverses the archive sequentially, it has no problem with that, needing just about 5 MB of RAM and a lot of time:

[…]
42.zip/lib f.zip/book f.zip/chapter f.zip/doc f.zip/page e.zip
42.zip/lib f.zip/book f.zip/chapter f.zip/doc f.zip/page e.zip/0.dll
42.zip/lib f.zip/book f.zip/chapter f.zip/doc f.zip/page f.zip
42.zip/lib f.zip/book f.zip/chapter f.zip/doc f.zip/page f.zip/0.dll
deepfind 42.zip  11644.12s user 303.89s system 97% cpu 3:24:02.46 total

I though won’t try deepgrep on 42.zip. ;-)

Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: dwdiff better than wdiff + colordiff //at 01:18 //by abe

A year ago I wrote in Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: How wdiff and colordiff help to choose the right Swiss Army Knife about using wdiff and colordiff together. Colordiff’ed wdiff output looks like this:

$ wdiff foobar.txt barfoo.txt | colordiff
[-foo-]bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla {+foo+} fasel

But if you have colour, why still having these hard to read wdiff markers still in the text?

There exists a tool named dwdiff which can do word diffs in colour without textual markers and with even less to type (and without being git diff --color-words ;-). Actually it looks like git diff --color-words, just without the git:

$ dwdiff -c foobar.txt barfoo.txt
foo bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla foo fasel

Another cool thing about dwdiff (and its name giving feature) is that you can defined what you consider whitespace, i.e. which character(s) delimit the words. So lets do the example above again, but this time declare that “f” is considered the only whitespace character:

$ dwdiff -W f -c foobar.txt barfoo.txt
foo bar bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla foo fasel

dwdiff can also show line numbers:

$ dwdiff -c -L foobar.txt barfoo.txt
   1:1    foo bar fnord
   2:2    gnarz hurz quux
   3:3    bla foo fasel
$ dwdiff -c -L foobar.txt quux.txt
   1:1    foo bar fnord
   1:2    foobar floedeldoe
   2:3    gnarz hurz quux
   3:4    bla foo fasel

(coloured shell screenshots by aha)

Tools to handle archives conveniently //at 01:42 //by abe

TL;DR: There’s a summary at the end of the article.

Today I wanted to see why a dependency in a .deb-package from an external APT repository changed so that it became uninstallable. While dpkg-deb --info foobar.deb easily shows the control information, the changelog is in the filesystem part of the package.

I could extract that one dpkg-deb, too, but I’d have to extract either to some temporary directory or pipe it into tar which then can extract a single file from the archive and sent it to STDOUT:

dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile foobar.deb | tar xOf - ./usr/share/doc/foobar/changelog.Debian.gz | zless

But that’s tedious to type. The following command is clearly less to type and way easier to remember:

acat foobar.deb ./usr/share/doc/foobar/changelog.Debian.gz | zless

acat stands for “archive cat” is part of the atool suite of commands:

als

lists files in an archive.

$ als foobar.tgz
drwxr-xr-x abe/abe           0 2012-11-15 00:19 foobar/
-rw-r--r-- abe/abe          13 2012-11-15 00:20 foobar/bar
-rw-r--r-- abe/abe          13 2012-11-15 00:20 foobar/foo

acat

extracts files in an archive to standard out.

$ acat foobar.tgz foobar/foo foobar/bar
foobar/bar
bar contents
foobar/foo
foo contents

adiff

generates a diff between two archives using diff(1).

$ als quux.zip
Archive:  quux.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
        0  2012-11-15 00:23   quux/
       16  2012-11-15 00:22   quux/foo
       13  2012-11-15 00:20   quux/bar
---------                     -------
       29                     3 files
$ adiff foobar.tgz quux.zip
diff -ru Unpack-3594/foobar/foo Unpack-7862/quux/foo
--- Unpack-3594/foobar/foo      2012-11-15 00:20:46.000000000 +0100
+++ Unpack-7862/quux/foo        2012-11-15 00:22:56.000000000 +0100
@@ -1 +1 @@
-foo contents
+foobar contents

arepack

repacks archives to a different format. It does this by first extracting all files of the old archive into a temporary directory, then packing all files extracted to that directory to the new archive. Use the --each (-e) option in combination with --format (-F) to repack multiple archives using a single invocation of atool. Note that arepack will not remove the old archive.

$ arepack foobar.tgz foobar.txz
foobar.tgz: extracted to `Unpack-7121/foobar'
foobar.txz: grew 36 bytes

apack

creates archives (or compresses files). If no file arguments are specified, filenames to add are read from standard in.

aunpack

extracts files from an archive. Often one wants to extract all files in an archive to a single subdirectory. However, some archives contain multiple files in their root directories. The aunpack program overcomes this problem by first extracting files to a unique (temporary) directory, and then moving its contents back if possible. This also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake.

(atool subcommand descriptions from the atool man page which is licensed under GPLv3+. Examples by me.)

I though miss the existence of an agrep subcommand. Guess why?

atool supports a wealth of archive types: tar (gzip-, bzip-, bzip2-, compress-/Z-, lzip-, lzop-, xz-, and 7zip-compressed), zip, jar/war, rar, lha/lzh, 7zip, alzip/alz, ace, ar, arj, arc, rpm, deb, cab, gzip, bzip, bzip2, compress/Z, lzip, lzop, xz, rzip, lrzip and cpio. (Not all subcommands support all archive types.)

Similar Utilities

There are some utilities which cover parts of what atool does, too:

Tools from the mtools package

Yes, they come from the “handle MS-DOS floppy disks tool” package, don’t ask me why. :-)

uz

gunzips and extracts a gzip‘d tar‘d archives

Advantage over aunpack: Less to type. :-)

Disadvantage compared to aunpack: Supports only one archive format.

lz

gunzips and shows a listing of a gzip‘d tar‘d archive

Advantage over als: One character less to type. :-)

Disadvantage compared to als: Supports only one archive format.

unp

unp extracts one or more files given as arguments on the command line.

$ unp -s
Known archive formats and tools:
7z:           p7zip or p7zip-full
ace:          unace
ar,deb:       binutils
arj:          arj
bz2:          bzip2
cab:          cabextract
chm:          libchm-bin or archmage
cpio,afio:    cpio or afio
dat:          tnef
dms:          xdms
exe:          maybe orange or unzip or unrar or unarj or lha 
gz:           gzip
hqx:          macutils
lha,lzh:      lha
lz:           lzip
lzma:         xz-utils or lzma
lzo:          lzop
lzx:          unlzx
mbox:         formail and mpack
pmd:          ppmd
rar:          rar or unrar or unrar-free
rpm:          rpm2cpio and cpio
sea,sea.bin:  macutils
shar:         sharutils
tar:          tar
tar.bz2,tbz2: tar with bzip2
tar.lzip:     tar with lzip
tar.lzop,tzo: tar with lzop
tar.xz,txz:   tar with xz-utils
tar.z:        tar with compress
tgz,tar.gz:   tar with gzip
uu:           sharutils
xz:           xz-utils
zip,cbz,cbr,jar,war,ear,xpi,adf: unzip
zoo:          zoo

So it’s very similar to aunpack, just a shorter command and it supports some more exotic archive formats which atool doesn’t support.

Also part of the unp package is ucat which does more or less the same as acat, just with unp as backend.

dtrx

From the man page of dtrx:

In addition to providing one command to extract many different archive types, dtrx also aids the user by extracting contents consistently. By default, everything will be written to a dedicated directory that’s named after the archive. dtrx will also change the permissions to ensure that the owner can read and write all those files.

Supported archive formats: tar, zip (including self-extracting .exe files), cpio, rpm, deb, gem, 7z, cab, rar, and InstallShield. It can also decompress files compressed with gzip, bzip2, lzma, or compress.

dtrx -l lists the contents of an archive, i.e. works like als or lz.

dtrx has two features not present in the other tools mentioned so far:

• It can extract metadata instead of the normal contents from .deb and .gem files.
• It can extract archives recursively, i.e. can extract archives inside of archives.

Unfortunately you can’t mix those two features. But you can use the following tool for that purpose:

deepfind

deepfind is a command from the package strigi-utils and recursively lists files in archives, including archives in archives. I’ve already written a detailed blog-posting about deepfind and its friend deepgrep.

tardiff

tardiff was written to check what changed in source code tarballs from one release to another. By default it just lists the differences in the file lists, not in the files’ contents and hence works different than adiff.

Summary

atool and friends are probably the first choice when it comes to DWIM archive handling, also because they have an easy to remember subcommand scheme.

uz and lz and the shortest way to extract or list the contents of a .tar.gz file. But nothing more. And you have to install mtools even if you don’t have a floppy drive.

unp comes in handy for exotic archive formats atool doesn’t support. And it’s way easier to remember and type than aunpack.

dtrx is neat if you want to extract archives in archives or if you want to extract metadata from some package files with just a few keystrokes.

For listing all files in recursive archives, use deepfind.