A happy misunderstanding...

[alexpgp]

I called my mother-in-law this morning, hoping to hear some news of Galina and her sister, and Galina answered the phone. Apparently, what I had understood to be a one-week sojourn was for the weekend only (the week-long trip was the river cruise that was sold out).

Speaking to Galina raised my spirits considerably.

We then set about the task of getting her sister up and running with Skype, as she had finally gone out and bought a microphone, and I was initially discouraged when neither my nor her computer could "see" the other via Skype. It didn't take long to figure out that her machine, although on and running Skype, wasn't actually connected to the Internet. Once that small hurdle was past, we made a computer-to-computer connection and had a fine conversation.

Skype's conference calling feature is pretty slick. Last week, I connected Natalie to a conversation I had started with Galina, and today, I dialed the kids' house and Galina had an opportunity to speak with Shannon and the grandkids, all for less than 5 cents per minute, which has got to rank as one of the stupendous values of all time!

* * *I learned - the hard way - that the UNIX tar program won't recurse into subdirectories if you want to specify a file name mask (e.g., *.html), so I ended up making a copy of my work directory tree, deleting everything but the Web files, and then running tar to create an archive of all such files.

The result is a text file containing the contents of all the HTML files I've been working on. This has let me go in and tweak the target text and make usage consistent (for example, change all instances of "access rights" to "access privileges"). I am just about through with the despeckling phase, and am looking at the lone remaining item on the plate, due by the end of the day tomorrow.

Cheers...

Comments

[russia-insider.livejournal.com]

Trying to establish Skype conversation with people who are not really in friends with their PC can be fun (:
We recently were instructing my mother in law how to set up a web camera for skype - took us about an hour time.

Happy Birthday Unix

[pilotkip.livejournal.com]

I use 'find' a lot in these circumstances. Coupled with xargs, it6 is a powerful tool:

find . -name "*.html" | xargs cat >> bigfile.txt

would create a file that contained the contents of all .html files below the current directory.

hth
-Kip

Re: Happy Birthday Unix

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

That's really pretty slick, and gets the first half of my job done very well.

Now, after I've edited bigfile.txt, is there a one-liner that would split it back up into the same individual (edited) files in a similar directory structure?

Cheers...

Re: Happy Birthday Unix

[pilotkip.livejournal.com]

Now I get what you are trying to do. Yes, you have to be careful not to change the binary information in your tar file. I did a test using vi and was able to untar the file without complaint. What editor gave you troubles?

To make the tar file:

find TOP_DIR/ -name "*.html" | xargs tar -cf TARFILE.tar

To edit in vi:
vi TARFILE.tar
:%s/OLDTEXT/NEWTEXT/g
:wq

To untar:
tar -xf TARFILE.tar

Re: Happy Birthday Unix

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Aha! I was careful not to edit "outside" of html file content, but my editor almost certainly munged the binary info from the get-go, so...

Thanks for that key piece of information.

Cheers...