Get ubuntu-restricted-extras and a lot more.  Check out the Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Post Installation Guide.

Bulk rename files – from the GUI or the command line

When I started usng Xubuntu last year, I was really impressed with the Thunar file manager’s plug-in for renaming multiple files.  In fact, when I switched over to using Gnome, I made sure to install Thunar to keep that amazing functionality.  I use it all the time for cleaning up directories of media: pictures from digital cameras, music files, videos.  You can use it for folders as well as files.

For Ubuntu-type users (regardless of your distro), assuming you’re not already running an XFCE distro, you can find Thunar in the repositories.  Install it with Synaptic Package Manager or at the command line with

sudo apt-get install thunar

But what if you want to do some bulk renaming from the command line? With an amazing tool like Thunar’s Bulk Rename, you probably wouldn’t have to, but one of the best things about free software is that you can almost always find another way to skin the cat.

I recently ran across the appropriately named rename command.  Check out this tutorial on how to make Perl-based Debian package work for you: How to bulk rename files from the terminal.

And it also looks like KDE has a GUI bulk renamer called Krename.

Try them all and let the rename game begin.

Check out the following articles for how to use a Linux tool called chntpw (which being translated means: change NT password) to delete a Windows password.

• Changing NT passwords with Linux and CHNTPW
• Change Windows Password from Ubuntu/Ubuntu Live CD

I have used a live-cd that I found here to delete passwords before.  Basically, it boots up a minimal Linux instance and uses the chntpw to delete the passwords.  This tool has the added benefit of automatically finding the location of the SAM file.  The guides above, however, have the benefit of working from any live-cd that has an internet connection (so you can use apt-get to install chntpw).

Get it via torrent.

The other day, a co-worker was in my office, and we needed to search for a spreadsheet on the server shared drive. I (shamefully) had to boot up my VirtualBox instance of XP in order to use the gui search function in it. All the while I kept thinking, “A real nerd would know how to do this at the command prompt.”

So today I did some research. I had already heard of the tools find and locate.  And I have been using grep in different situations (like to limit results from other commands).  But I never really knew how to use these tools to find exactly what I was looking for.  Fortunately (and this is one of the best parts about using Linux) many nerds have gone before me and documented what they know.  So a simple Google search is often all it takes to step up my Linux game.

Using find

The find command has way more features than I’m about to list.  Basically, I’m just going to show you how to use it to find the location of a file based on a given parameter.  It returns the paths of any files it finds that match your search expression.

The find command uses the following syntaxt format:

find [path] [options] [expression]

Say you want to find a file named “foobar.txt”, but you can’t remember if you called it “foobar.txt” or “fubar.txt” or “foobar.odt”.  The simplest method is to use find with the -name option (or -iname to make it case-insensitive).

To search your home directory, you can use:

find /home -name *bar*

Change the path option to change the directory to search against.  This command will search the current directory:

find . -name *bar*

This one will search against the root directory:

find / -name *bar*

Using locate

The locate command works similarly to find, but it works off a database instead of actually churning through the files.  Like find, it returns the paths of any files it finds that match your expression.  Use the -i option to make the search insensitive.  locate uses the following format:

locate [options] [expression]

Now, since locate searches against its own database, you will need to update the database in order to make sure you actually locate something with locate.  Run the updatedb command as root to do so.  Ubuntu-like users can use the following command:

sudo updatedb

Once you update the database, then run the locate command.  To find our foobar.txt file, use:

locate *bar*

Using grep

The first two commands are great if you know the name (or at least part of the name) of the file you’re looking for.  But what if you want to find a file based on text within the file?  As I mentioned above, grep works wonders for limiting the results of other commands.  So if you want to ls the files that start with the letter “d”, you can use the following command (Note, that once again, the -i option makes your search case-insensitive.)

ls | grep -i ^d

In my home directory, the above command returns:

Desktop
Documents
Downloads
DVD ISOs

But I didn’t realize that I could use grep on its own, without piping the output of some other command to it.  Grep uses the following format:

grep [options] [pattern] [file]

So, if you want to search your home directory for a file that has the phrase “foo pwns bar”, you can use the following command.  Note, we are using a few more options than the usual -i for case-insensitive searching; the -l restricts the results to just a list of file names, and the -r option makes the search recursive (i.e., it drills down through the directory structure).

grep -lir "foo pwns bar" *

Since you’re searching against the text within the files, be prepared for grep to take a lot longer than the find and locate examples above which just search against the names of the files.  To make the search more optimal, try to limit it to where you think the file will be located.  The example above will search recursively through the whole directory you are in.  Feel free to change the file name to a path to optimize your search, like so:

grep -lir "foo pwns bar" /home/myfolder/Documents

And if you want grep to return the line where it found your search expression, then you can leave out the -l option.  This command:

grep -r "foo pwns bar" /home/rix/Documents/*

returns the folloing results for me:

/home/rix/Documents/foobar.txt:The power of foo pwns bar to the maxXXorz!1!!

Notice the name of the file followed by the line where it found the search expression.  Keep in mind that grep returns whole lines, so be prepared for some messy output, depending on the document.

Learn more

For more indepth tutorials, check out the following.

• Finding things with locate, find, and grep
• Example uses of the Linux Command find

And check out Nixie Pixel’s video: Linux Tutorial: The Power of the Linux Find Command below

I found a great explanation of using regex with OO.o’s search and replace feature in Writer: Searching and replacing paragraph returns (carriage returns), tabs, and other special characters in OpenOffice Writer.

Cut & Paste Chmod Calculator, where have you been all my life?

Thanks to the Masters of the Linux Universe for pointing this out to me.

Gentoo Peeble mentioned a Space Invaders clone hidden in Calc. A quick Google search revealed a few more easter eggs noted on the OO.o wiki.  Although, I couldn’t get the Tic Tac Toe to work for me.

Check out this post on the Linux Mint Blog about a Mint user who bought a new PC from Dell, rejected the EULA, and… get this… got a refund!

He donated his refund to Linux Mint. Way to not only beat the Microsoft tax, but to negate it by giving the money to the Open Source world.

I had used k9copy to make backups of some of the DVDs in my collection, but instead of selecting the final output as .iso files, I had set k9copy to produces title set folders.  After learning that my favourite media player (VLC) would play an .iso file just as if it were on an actual DVD.  So I needed a way to transform my TS folders into .iso files.  After some research, I found that mkisofs could do the trick.

The syntax for mkisofs is pretty straightforward, though different from some other input/output tools.  In order to generate my .iso files, I used the following options in mkisofs:

• -o to indicate the output file location and name
• -V to set the volume label on the .iso file (which VLC displays when it begins playing the file)
• -dvd-video to generate a DVD-Video compliant UDF file system

The general format for the mkisofs command is

mkisofs [options] file

So, if your AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS  are located in /home/dude/ts_folders/mydvd, and you want your .iso file to be /home/dude/dvdisos/mydvd.iso, then you could use the following command

mkisofs -dvd-video -o /home/dude/dvdisos/mydvd.iso -V MYDVD /home/dude/ts_folders/mydvd/