#takes 2 parameters:
# 1 - the number of time you can to execute the loop
# 2 - the action to call
# Executes a command multiple times
xloop(){
ITERATIONS=$1;
for ((x = 0 ; x <= $ITERATIONS ; x++)); do
${*:2}
done
}
Example use:
xloop 3 date +"%Y-%M-%d"
In case you have some output you want to add it to an HTML document, you need to make some modifications to it to make it appear properly.
One of them would be to replace the newline characters with the <br> tag.
If you have GNU sed, you can use the -i option, which will do the replacement in place.
sed -i 's/$/<br>/' myTextFile.txt
Otherwise you will have to redirect to another file and rename it over the old one.
sed 's/$/<br>/' myTextFile.txt > myTextFile.txt.tmp && mv myTextFile.txt.tmp myTextFile.txt
If you want to perform this change on the results of another command (because you are redirecting it to an email client like mutt) you can use the following example
someCommand | sed 's/$/<br>/' | someOtherCommand
We tried to toggle the visibility of the terminator window using the configuration in the ‘Terminator Preferences’ under Keybindings.
But, we could not get the hide_window keybinding to work and so we could not toggle the window visibility with a single key.
After trying other versions of the terminator source which also failed we switched to an alternative solution.
This solution requires two additional packages: xdotool and wmctrl.
In Fedora you can install them using sudo yum install xdotool wmctrl and in Ubuntu using sudo apt-get install xdotool wmctrl
After the installation is complete, you need to paste the following code in a file and make it an executable.
e.g From a terminal issue nano ~/toggle_visibility.sh, then paste the code and hit CTRL+X to exit. When prompted if you want to save press ‘Y’ and enter.
#!/bin/bash
#The purpose of this script is to allow the user to toggle the visibility of (almost) any window.
#Please note it will work on the first match, so if there are multiple instances of an application it would be a random window of them the one to be affected.
#Checking that all dependencies are met, since we cannot proceed without them.
declare -a DEPENDENCIES=("xdotool" "wmctrl");
declare -a MANAGERS=("yum" "apt-get");
for DEPENDENCY in ${DEPENDENCIES[@]};
do
echo -n "Checking if $DEPENDENCY is available";
if hash $DEPENDENCY 2>/dev/null;
then
echo "- OK, Found";
else
echo "- ERROR, Not Found in $PATH";
for MANAGER in ${MANAGERS[@]};
do
if hash $MANAGER 2>/dev/null;
then
echo -n "$DEPENDENCY is missing, would you like to try and install it via $MANAGER now? [Y/N] (default is Y): ";
read ANSWER;
if [[ "$ANSWER" == "Y" || "$ANSWER" == "y" || "$ANSWER" == "" ]];
then
sudo "$MANAGER" install "$DEPENDENCY";
else
echo "Terminating";
exit -1;
fi
fi
done
fi
done
APPLICATION="$1";
#Checking if the application name provided by the user exists
if ! hash $APPLICATION 2>/dev/null;
then
echo -e "$APPLICATION does not seem to be a valid executable\nTerminating";
exit -2;
fi
#Checking if the application is running. We are using pgrep as various application are python scripts and we will not be able to find them using pidof. pgrep will look through the currently running processes and list the process IDs of all the processes that are called $APPLICATION.
PID=$(pgrep $APPLICATION | head -n 1);
#If the application is not running, we will try to launch it.
if [ -z $PID ];
then
echo "$APPLICATION not running, launching it..";
$APPLICATION;
else
#Since the application has a live instance, we can proceed with the rest of the code.
#We will get the PID of the application that is currently focused, if it is not the application we passed as parameter we will change the focus to that. In the other case, we will minimize the application.
echo -n "$APPLICATION instance found - ";
FOCUSED=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowpid);
if [[ $PID == $FOCUSED ]];
then
echo "It was focused so we are minimizing it";
#We minimize the active window which we know in this case that it is the application we passed as parameter.
xdotool getactivewindow windowminimize;
else
echo "We are setting the focus on it";
#We set the focus to the application we passed as parameter. If it is minimized it will be raised as well.
wmctrl -x -R $APPLICATION;
fi
fi
exit 0
Afterwards, you need to make the script an executable so you should issue chmod +x ~/toggle_visibility.sh to do that.
Then, execute ~/toggle_visibility.sh in your terminal once. We need to do that in order to install any missing dependencies for the tool.
Finally, you need to create a custom shortcut that will call the script using the key combination you like at any point.
For Fedora,
gnome-control-panel to start the gnome control panel.For Ubuntu, go to System Settings and follow the same procedure after step 2.
You are ready to go 🙂
Just try the key combination you just provided and terminator will appear in front of you. Pressing it once more it will hide it.
There are times that you need to execute a script as another user, usually to make sure you do not mess up the access rights of the files that will be produced after the execution of the script.
An easy way to do it is using the command su (su allows to run commands with a substitute user and group ID).
An example would be to use it as su - <USER> -c "<COMMAND>”
The – <USER> will start the shell as a login shell with an environment similar to a real login.
The -c “<COMMAND>” will pass the command after -c to the newly created shell, you should wrap it in quotes if you want to pass parameters to your command.
