Software Needs and Nerds

Spread the love

I have two items for you. First, I’d like you to inspect this brilliant computer game and come up with a bash equivilant (or something that will run from the Linux Command Line). The current version of the program is 32 megabytes of some kind of DOS based source code. I’m sure we can do this in perl or awk as a couple of one liners kobbed together.

Second assignment. This could get you the prize in the now-getting-stale Land of Lisp Book Giveaway. Here’s what I want. I keep snippets of code and stuff in text files. For instance, I have a standardized org-mode header that sets a lot of common options I like fr making html files (I use it for these to process Ana’s Feed) and another for pdf files. Here’s what I want, and there is more than one way to do it:

I need a utility that quickly and easily with no fuss and no muss sucks the contents (text) out of a text file (well, a copy of it) and puts it on my clipboard. I might like this to be the X clipboard so I can use it anywhere, but I’d be happy with it going onto the kill ring. But, it has to be something implemented from a gnome interface, or nautilus. For instance, as a nautilus macro that calls some code that affects the currently running instance of emacs, so I can find the file with the snippet in nautilus, right click on it and chose “suck the text out” and then, magically, the text is now on my clipboard.

Thank you very much.

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.

Spread the love

2 thoughts on “Software Needs and Nerds

  1. Yes, I’ve used those commands. They’re quite useful. At one point I had a date command format the current date and time into the strange way my blogging software required it, and stuck it on the clipboard. That would definitively be part of the solution.

    cat [filename] | xclip -selection clipboard

    Somewhere around here I’ve got a python script that takes standard input and puts it on the clipboard.

Leave a Reply to Greg Laden Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *