PARD: Utilities
Afio is an archiver/backup program that produces cpio-format archives. It is
best used as an archive engine in a backup script.
Like tar, afio can make compressed archives. However, the compressed
archives produced by afio are much safer than tar -z archives. If a tar -z
archive has a read error, tar is unable to extract the files beyond this
error. The compressed archive format used by afio allows it to recover from
read errors and go on unpacking the next file.
crw is an easy to learn, easy to use, command line oriented calculator. It
supports both interactive mode, and command line arguments. The latter
making it suitable for scripts. crw's features include functions like sin,
asin, cos, lg, a fully featured fraction datatype, implicit multiplication,
all the common operators, and lots more.
Bzip2 is a high-quality drop-in replacement for the GNU Gzip data
compressor. It is designed to give compression close to the best available
techniques, whilst being fast and small enough to be practical for
production use.
Gzip reduces the size of the named files using Lempel-Ziv coding LZ77.
Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the extension .gz,
while keeping the same ownership modes, access and modification times.
lzop is a file compressor very similiar to gzip. Its main advantages over
gzip are much higher compression and decompression speed, at the cost of
some compression ratio.
lzop was designed with the following goals in mind:
- speed (both compression and decompression)
- reasonable drop-in
compatibility to gzip
- portability
The GNU Privacy Guard is a complete PGP replacement.
SSLeay is a free implementation of Netscape's Secure Socket Layer - the
software encryption protocol behind the Netscape Secure Server and the
Netscape Navigator Browser.
SSLeay implements the following encryption algorithms:
ZipCracker will try to find the correct password for a given file in a zip
archive, by using the Brute force method(TM).
The fileutils package contains the GNU file management utilities. Most of
these programs have significant advantages over their Unix counterparts,
such as greater speed, additional options, and fewer arbitrary limits. It
includes programs to copy, move, list, etc, files.
gtkfind is a gtk-based file finding and manipulation program. It is what you
use when you don't want to bother looking up all the arguments to find(1).
You can match files by name, type, date, etc. and run programs on them.
Lsof's name stands for LiSt Open Files, and it does just that. It lists
information about files that are open by the processes running on a UNIX
system.
XDelta is a library interface and application program designed to compute
changes between files. These changes (deltas) are similar to the output of
the diff program in that they may be used to store and transmit
only the changes between files. However, unlike diff, the
output of XDelta is not expressed in a human-readable format. XDelta can
also apply these deltas to a copy of the original file(s). XDelta uses a
fast, linear algorithm and performs well on both binary and text files.
XDelta typically outperforms GNU diff in both time and
generated-delta-size, even for plain text files. XDelta also includes a
simple implementation of the Rsync algorithm and several advanced features
for implementing RCS-like file-archival upon.
HFS is the Hierarchical File System, the native volume format
used on modern Macintosh computers. hfsutils is the name of a comprehensive
software package being developed to permit manipulation of HFS volumes from
UNIX and other systems.
The package contains several command-line programs, a tk-based front end for
browsing and copying files, and a Tcl package and interface for scriptable
access to volumes.
This is lde, the Linux disk editor, for Minix/Linux partitions. It currently
supports what were once the three most popular file systems under Linux:
ext2fs, minix, and xiafs (there is also a nofs system under which
lde will function as a binary editor). lde allows you to view and edit disk
blocks as hex and/or ASCII, view/navigate directory entries, and view and
edit formatted inodes. Most of the functions can be accessed using the
program's curses interface or from the command line so that you can automate
things with your own scripts.
lde can also be used to recover files which may have been accidentally
erased or just to poke around the file system to see what it's made of. I've
included a short introduction to the Minix file system (just enough to get
the ideas of blocks and inodes across to most people) and some docs on the
ext2fs (mostly just data out of <linux/ext2_fs.h> formatted as tables
to make wading through the disk blocks a little bit easier). If you aren't
familiar with inode based file systems, you should have a look at those
files before proceeding to the doc/UNERASE file, which details what I think
you might try to recover a file.
Mount is used for adding new filesystems, both local and networked,to your
current directory structure. The filesystems must already exist for this to
work. It can also be used to change the access types the kernel uses for
already-mounted filesystems.
The Linux PCI Utilities contain various utilities for dealing with the PCI
bus in Linux:
- lspci
- displays detailed information about all PCI busses and devices
in the system, replacing the original /proc/pci interface.
- setpci
-
allows to read from and write to PCI device configuration registers. For
example, you can adjust the latency timers with it.
Miscellaneous utilities for Linux.
This is a port to various operating systems (including Linux, SunOS,
Solaris, MS-DOS, and OS/2) of the standard unix cal(1) program. It includes
new features like color support, daily reminders/appointments, etc. The
thing I like most about it is that I can use the same program and data file
on all platforms I access.
The GNU binutils package provides programs to assemble and manipulate binary
and object files. Included are the GNU assembler (gas), the GNU linker,
gprof, and various binary utilities.
Defragmenter for the ext2fs filesystem.
Note from PARD's maintainer: Under normal circumstances the fragmentation of
ext2fs filesystems is too low that it deserves defragmentation. But your
mileage may vary.
jslaunch is a very small daemon/program that will start a specified shell
command when a combination of joystick buttons is pressed. One of its uses
is as a backup way to make a clean shutdown if your console has been messed
up by X11 or SVGAlib and you don't have a terminal sitting on your desk to
log in and shut down from, but you can use it for example as a remote
control to do just about anything (including starting a measurement on an
experimental setup connected to your computer).
Grep searches the named input files or standard input for lines containing a
match to the given pattern.
Sed is a stream editor -- used for scripted data transformations,
such as transforming a data stream within a pipeline.
Sgrep is a tool to search and index text, SGML, XML and HTML files using
structured patterns.
© 1999 by Stefan Hornburg
<racke@linuxia.de>
Last modified 03. June 1999
