Tag: terminal

Categories
Mac

Fix garbled output of the tree command on macOS

Recently I had the need to produce a text file containing the directory structure of a folder and all its content.
The tree command is just what I needed. A quick brew install tree installed it on my Mac.

One would think that it would just be a matter of running

tree /path/to/folder > /path/to/tree.txt

That’s true, for small directories (or those with no special characters?), for others I get this lovely crap:

Screwed up oupput of the tree command on macOS

Turns out the fix is pretty easy (altough you loose non ASCII characters in file names):

LC_ALL=C tree /path/to/folder > /path/to/tree.txt
Categories
Mac

Clipboard new-line format when copying from Preview

Today I helped my brother with a Keyboard Maestro macro he needed. Basically, he wanted to take some text from a PDF created by Notability, which inserts new lines to have text flow around images, and remove these new lines.

Preview

Pretty easy, I thought: pbpaste to tr and remove \n. Nope. For some reason, maybe some old Mac OS 9 heritage, when copying text from Preview new lines are saved as carriage returns, i.e. \r.

This stupid behavior means that if you try to pbpaste something which contains line breaks in your terminal, you only get the last line. You can view the full output by replacing \r with \n:

pbpaste | tr '\r' '\n'

This lame thing had me waste some time, so I hope this short post makes your life easier.

P.S.: The full command I had my brother put in Keyboard Maestro is:

pbpaste | tr '\r' ' ' | pbcopy

Followed by a Paste action. This replaces line breaks with spaces and pastes the result.

Categories
Linux Mac

Use .rev files from the command line

Sometimes, when you download a big multi-part rar file, a part gets corrupted, or it is not even available. Often, however, .rev files are made available, and they’ll let you extract the file even with missing/corrupted parts. In fact, they let you re-create these parts, in a way similar to RAID-5/6 for hard disks.

Rar files

You can use the command line rar tool to do all the job. First, head over to rarlab, the official site, and download the appropriate version for your OS.

On Linux and OS X, you might want to move the binaries into your path, for example into /usr/bin.

Then, cd into the directory where your parts reside (together with .rev files, you need one for each damaged part you wish to recover), and launch:

rar rc yourfile-part01.rar

The rc switch tells rar to ReConstruct any missing parts (I’d advise you to move somewhere else or delete any damaged parts). Point it to part number 1, it’ll figure out the rest. The process can be quite long, more so for big archives, but it’s worth waiting. After it’s done, you can extract your files as usual, or directly using the command line:

rar x yourfile-part01.rar