Cos Programs last updated 2001-10-10

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Unix admin scripts

These days I don't really program anymore, but I admin Unix boxes and I like perl, so occasionally I write a script that might come in useful for other sysadmins. Here are some.

logrotation v3.7: Flexible periodic log file rotation, renaming, compression, truncation, controlled using a central configuration file.
diskwarn v2.0: Run from crontab to get warnings about high disk usage.
frm and readmsg: Like the frm and readmsg commands that came with Elm. I missed these when I switched to mutt. frm lists messages in a mailbox file, readmsg displays a selected message on stdout.
ticktock: A silly way to deal with firewalls that cut your connection for inactivity
resolveips v1.2: A simple filter that will resolve things that look like IP numbers into hostnames using DNS.
date.stub.pl: A snippet of perl code for dealing with dates and times, that I keep handy for use in other scripts.
ystocks: Get stock quotes from Yahoo's web site and display them in a simple text-only column format

Some DOS programs I wrote when I was young...

A few games and utilities I wrote during my junior high and high school years, mostly 1983-1989. I've updated a few of them in minor ways since then, so you may see later copyright dates. These are ZIP files that contain PC DOS executables. If you don't have a ZIP program to access these files, try the free programs from Info-ZIP.

(These are all programs for PC-DOS computers)

Cos File Dump Utility v1.42: View the contents of binary files in a variety of hex and ASCII formats, including a binary strip mode that extracts only ASCII data from the file.
Cos Spiders v1.02: A graphics demo - fun with various patterns and color cycling.
Invaders v1.10: A character graphics game that will run even on old monochrome text-only display adapters. Basic Space Invaders sort of theme with a few minor twists.
Shoot v1.50: A simple, fast-paced game. Shoot the four objects flying around the screen as many times as you can before your energy runs out. Each hit gives you more energy, each miss loses some, and it also decays with time, so be quick and accurate.
Stats v0.00 (I lost my source code :): Text file statistics - characters, words, lines, pages

A few nifty DOS utilities ...

Some of these were originally published in PC Magazine

browse.com - text file viewing / paging utility: Programs like this are now pretty standard on all DOS machines, so you probably don't need this one. It used to be useful...
where.com - file finder: Similar to whereis, Norton's FF, etc. As with browse.com, this function is pretty standard by now.
change.com - simple search and replace: For simple search-replace operations on small files. It takes as arguments a filename, and two strings, which may include quoted text and ASCII values. For example, to change a text file from LF terminated to CRLF terminated,
change file.txt 10 13,10
Or to change X's at the beginning of lines to Y's,
change file.txt 10,"X" 10,"Y"
vga28.com - 28 line text mode: This utility causes a VGA to load the EGA screen font. Since the VGA has somewhat higher resolution in text mode than EGA, the font that yields 25 lines on EGA gives you 28 on the VGA. Besides, I think the EGA font looks nicer.
uuencode.exe and uudecode.exe: Utilities to encode binary data in UUencode format, and to convert it back. A lot of binaries, such as images, are posted on Usenet in UUencode format.

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