Jean-Etienne's blog » Work

Awk oneliner to find a string in text files

Jean-Etienne — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:00:08 +0000

If you want to know the name of files containing a special string, grep -c is your friend. But you also get names of files not containing your string (with count = 0). If you only want the names of files containing “mystring”, awk can help you:

grep -c "mystring" * | awk ' !/:0/ '

And if you don’t even want the number of times “mystring” appears (on 1 line):

grep -c "mystring" * | awk ' !/:0/ '| awk '{split($0, a, ":"); print a[1]}'

Any other ideas?

Firefox 3.0 + Flash on a protected Windows PC

Jean-Etienne — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:40:17 +0000

Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps.

Most Firefox plugins (“add-ons“) can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights …

Unless your company installed Firefox 2.x on your computer with the Flash plug-in. If it’s the case, you have just to copy two files from the 2.x install to the 3.0 one :

Go to your “old” Firefox plugins directory, for example: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\. Then copy these 2 files: NPSWF32.dll and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe to your Portable Firefox directory, like: FirefoxPortable\App\firefox\plugins\. Now re-start Firefox 3.0 … Voilà!

I can’t read my blog

Jean-Etienne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:47:36 +0000

At least from my office. Sadly true since one of the rules of my company proxy server bans all URLs with the letters “blog” inside (no blogger.com, blogspot, … websites either). Fortunately, there are a lot of web-based feed aggregators (which are not — not yet? — banned). It also blocks all URLs with the “exe” string so we are not able to visit the Belgian Post website (it uses an URL containing “outletlocator.exe”) ; I didn’t find any bypass yet.

Btw, with their message, we know they use Microsoft ISA Server as a proxy …