MLK Tools Description


  • tgz: this is the first one I coded some years ago. On that days, the tar command didn't include support for compressed files (-z option, from 'man tar'); at least it didn't on IRIX 5.3 through 6.5.x (SGI). This tool, as you guessed, can be used to create, list and extract contents from a .tar.gz or .tgz file. It's still shorter than typing "tar -ztvf whatever.tgz" :-)

  • tbz: years later, as the bzip2 utility appeared, I made a tgz-sequel to handle the .tar.bz2 or .tbz2 files and this tool was born. Its use is very similar to tgz.

  • setbackground: this tool was coded before any window manager, such as 4DWm (IRIX), allowed to set any picture in any format as background/wallpaper. This can be achieved passing some parameters to the image viewer 'xv'; and that's what's this tool is all about.

  • mp3towav: eaving legal issues aside, when I downloaded one or some audio files in MP3 format and I wanted to burn them into a CD, I should use the WAVE format, for example. There's a nice tool for UNIX/Linux called mpg123 by Michael Hipp that, from version 0.59r, converts MP3 to WAV. Because there are some parameters I had to enter for the conversion to work, I did this util to make it easier/faster, and also added some features for batch processing, etc.

  • mmove: from time to time I needed to change the files' extensions. That was not a problem when they where 2 or 3 files but some other times I found up to 200 files with the wrong extension; for example: .mpe instead of .mp3. In fact, 'mmove' stands for 'multiple move'. Beware of the existance of another 'mmove', which is a command from the Mtools used to move or rename an MS-DOS file or subdirectory (pasted from the 'man mmove'-headers :-) ).

  • space2underscore: sometines I stumbled with filenames containing whitespaces. Some scripts of mine already contained a little function to convert spaces into underscores but I thought that making it a separate tool would be useful as well. Filenames such as "my file number one.ext" will turn into "my_file_number_one.ext".

  • zombiewatchdog: every time in a while one or more zombie/defunct processes appeared on my systems after a long uptime. They didn't represent a big menace as I could live along with them for, say, a week. I knew that it was a certain application causing those zombies, so I made this little script to watch for them and kill them when needed, either automatically or manually; both functions can be done passing the right option to the script. The best way to run it is putting it on a user's crontab with enough priviledges to kill processes.


Installation Note:

To avoid conflicts with other utils, the MLK-Tools will all install with the mlk-prefix, so you will end up with, for example: mlkmmove, mlktbz, mlkmp3towav, etc.
The MLK-Tools are provided with an installer, also developed in Ksh, so you can put them whereever you want in your system.

Dependencies:

The MLK Tools require the following extra commands/utils to be installed on your system: