Bash completion error — quote_readline.

There is a problem with bash completion with quote_readline that causes the completion to fail. The problem is fixed in the bash completion package but there are still some other programs which are using the problematic code. Here is a way to find and resolve it.

First find the problematic program, most likely the recent one after which you started having the problems. Once that is found, find the file containing the definition of the function ”_filedirs()”. Now, delete this file and create a symbolic link to the bash_completion file in the /etc directory. If this file is not present then you need to install the bashcompletion package.

bash script to change vim colorscheme based on the available themes

Here’s one script that you may find useful. A little variation or wrapper for this script can make your life colorful 🙂

You can write a wrapper to this to take one of the inputs randomly and then use it in alias to start <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim.

Detecting URLs in a Block of Text

Jan Goyvaerts on <a href="http://www.regex-guru.info/2008/11/detecting-urls-in-a-block-of-text/" target="_blank">Detecting URLs in a Block of Text

In his blog post <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001181.html">The Problem with URLs points out some of the issues with trying to detect URLs in a larger body of text using a regular expression.

The short answer is that it can’t be done. Pretty much any character is valid in URLs. The very simplistic <span class="regex">\bhttp://\S+ not only fails to differentiate between punctuation that’s part of the URL, and punctuation used to quote the URL. It also fails to match URLs with spaces in them. Yes, spaces are valid in URLs, and I’ve encountered quite a few web sites that use them over the years. It also forgets other protocols, such as https.

bash – change theme for gtk in gnome and take screenshot from script.

I wrote a blog on bash script to change the icon/cursor theme using a bash script. Lets extend the same concept a little more and use the script to change the gtk theme for gnome and at the same time take a screenshot also.

#!/bin/bash
path=&#8221;/tmp/screenshot&#8221;
[[ &#8221;$1&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ &#8221;$2&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && (
cd ~/.themes
cont=&#8221;y&#8221;
echo &#8221;Select one of the icon themes&#8221;
echo &#8221;When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c&#8221;
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] || (
echo &#8221;Now trying …. : $i&#8221;
gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme &#8221;$i&#8221;
sleep 1
j=$(echo &#8221;$path/$i&#8221;).jpg
import -window root -quality 95 &#8221;$j&#8221;
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme &#8221;$2&#8221;

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unbound variable – bash completion not working and having issues with other stuff like command not found.

I generally use vi/vim for all my practical purposes of working with text files. And I have all the vi/vim plugins required to work with the files. This causes the following to be in the skeleton for all the bash scripts that I create:

set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error

With this all the unbound variables as errors and was problem with all the shell scripts that was being sourced in the startup of bash. So all I had to do was remove this from all the startup scripts and then from the skeleton of the bash script in vim :).

Useless Linux Terminal Commands

Useless Linux Terminal Commands Not long ago, I have listed here some useful Linux terminal commands and those that I described as deadly. This time, I decided to gather some commands that I think have no practical use. I know it sounds interesting but you may disagree with me on some of the commands that I&#8217;ll list here as you may find a few of them useful. We can however agree to disagree as long as you explain to us why or how you find them handy.

Quick tip to change parameters in different files