The image below shows a small, demonstration PDF: When I highlight the text in the PDF, only the paragraphs and their internal spaces go to the X, or primary clipboard: When I middle-click-paste from the primary clipboard into a text editor, each line of text in the PDF appears on a new line,…

I have a script that compiles and sorts museum collection data. One of the data fields is for museum registration codes, and a plain sort doesn't understand that humans expect "KS.99", for example, to come before "KS.100": My script instead uses the magic "-V" option…

In part 1 of this article I showed how I used AWK on the command line to work up daily rainfall data for my home town, Ulverstone in Tasmania. I wasn't ready to analyse the data, because there were quite a few missing-data days. Some were part of accumulated-total series, where the rainfall total…

AWK is my tool of choice for processing plain-text data, so when I wanted to look closely at daily rainfall data for my home town, I fired up a terminal. In this two-part article I explain how the rainfall data were beaten into shape, mainly with AWK, so I could do my analysis. The commands shown…

I was preparing a slide presentation and wanted to show a block of random 8-bit bytes, like this: Naturally I didn't just type out that block of text on a slide, which would have taken maybe 10 minutes, or copy and modify some byte-text I found online. Of course not. Instead I spent hours dreaming…

Just mere days after the news broke that Canonical would be using the GNOME desktop environment in the default release of the Ubuntu operating system, following the news of the company also dropping the Unity desktop and the greater goal of "convergence", newly re-appointed Canonical CEO…

When writing or editing scientific-type text in LibreOffice Writer, I rely a lot on its spellchecker. Unfortunately, the scientific terms I'd like to check aren't in the default dictionaries behind LibreOffice's spellchecking routine. There are two ways out of this dilemma. The first is to deal…

I use the YAD dialog program quite a lot in my shell scripts. Written and maintained by Victor Ananjevksy, YAD is easy to use and has dozens of handy options. In previous Linux Rain articles demonstrating YAD (here, here and here), I used only the default YAD buttons, "Cancel" and…

In my data-cleaning work I often make up tallies of selected individual characters from big, UTF-8-encoded data files. What's the best way to do this? As shown below, I've tried grep/sort/uniq, AWK and Ruby, and AWK's the fastest. The trials also revealed an unexpected problem with the uniq program…

Being a rolling release distribution that touts the ability to have the latest stuff, you'll often find the very latest software in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. In the official repos, anyway. Certain software that is procured from external repositories such as Packman, however, this is not always the case.…