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Google Chrome Text Highlight Searching and Navigation

Ryan — Mon, 09 May 2011 04:54:30 +0000

Google Chrome is an awesome browser and there are a few tricks that you should learn that make it that much better. Some of the coolest and simplest are text highlight for searching and navigation. Both of these tricks will save you an unbelievable amount of time, and they are only but a couple of examples of what makes Chrome shine.

Highlight Searching

Highlight a word or phrase and right click on it. You will be given the option to search Google for that phrase in a new tab. Pretty slick.

Highlight Navigation

Highlight a URL and right click. You will be given an option to navigate to that URL in a new tab. This comes in very handy when you encounter a web address that is missing a hyperlink tag. This can be a common occurance in many online forums or comment pages that don’t allow links.

Echo text without a trailing newline

Ryan — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:28:20 +0000

By default the echo command will include a trailing newline at the end of a string. There are many times when you may want to suppress this newline for example when you want to format text in a certain way.There are a couple easy ways to do this.

First you can use the ‘-n’ option.
$ echo -n "hello"

You can also use the ‘-e’ option which enables interpretation of backslash escapes. Followed by a ‘\c’ escape character to signal continuation (no automatic line break).
$ echo -e "hello\c"

Convert PDF file to text with pdftotext

Ryan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:56:14 +0000

In many cases it can be helpful to access text from within a PDF file but accomplishing this can be next to impossible. Luckily in Linux there is a command line program called pdftotext which is included with the xpdf package.

This first step is making sure that the xpdf package is installed. In Ubuntu you can use the following command.
$ sudo apt-get install xpdf

Now you can convert a PDF to text with pdftotext. This code will output a file named <filename>.txt
$ pdftotext <filename>.pdf

You can also attempt to preserve some of the formatting within the PDF such as columns and spacing by using the “-layout” option.
$ apdftotext -layout <filename>.pdf

Convert text files within a directory from Windows to Unix format

Ryan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:14:33 +0000

When a file is saved in Windows and then moved to a Linux system the formatting differences can cause a variety of problems. To effectively use these files you will need to change the format from Windows/DOS to Unix. This conversion occurs by simply removing the Windows carriage return characters.

I have explained how to use the tr command remove these windows carriage returns, but when you have a large amount of files to convert this can become tedious. As a solution to this I have written a BASH script to convert all text files within a directory.

#!/bin/bash

for file in /directory/to/convert/*
do
  if [[ -f $file && `file $file | grep text` ]]
  then
    tr -d '\r' < $file > "$file"_clear
    mv "$file"_clear $file
  fi
done

Remove Windows carriage returns with tr

Ryan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:46:17 +0000

The end of a line in a UNIX text file is designated with the newline character. In Windows, a line ends with both newline and carriage return ASCII characters. If a file is saved in Windows and then moved to a Linux system these carriage returns can cause all sorts of problems. If the text file is a BASH script for example it will not run correctly since it doesn’t know how to interpret these characters.

You can verify that a text file has these Windows carriage returns by running the cat command with the ‘-v‘ option which shows the non-printing characters.

$ cat -v inputfile | head

first line^M
second line^M

You can see the carriage return characters, “^M” (Cntl-M).

CRLF = Carriage Return Line Feed

There are various was to remove these carriage returns. You can use the dos2unix command but this is rarely installed by default on a a Linux system. The easiest way then is to use the “tr” command utility which always comes standard.

The command uses the tr command which translates and removes characters. This will remove the carriage return characters.

$ tr -d '\r' < inputfile > outputfile

You can verify they are really gone by running the same cat command again.

$ cat -v outputfile | head

first line
second line

You can also run the file command.

$ file inputfile

inputfile:             ASCII text

Optionally you can now overwrite the original file.

$ mv outputfile inputfile

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Ryan — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:49:05 +0000

This is the list of the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts. It is amazing how much more efficient you can be when your not always reaching for your mouse.

Controlling Tabs

New Tab – Ctrl+T
Close Tab – Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4
Next Tab – Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PageDown
Previous Tab – Ctrl+Shft+Tab or Ctrl+PageUp
Select Tab [1 to 9] – Ctrl+[1 to 9]

Searching Text

Find in This Page – Ctrl+F
Find Again – Ctrl+G or F3
Find Previous – Ctrl+Shft+G or Shft+F3

Other Commands

Full Screen – F11
Reload – F5 or Ctrl+R
Reload (override cache) – Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+Shft+R
Select All – Ctrl+A