Creating Aliases to work on the most recent file

Often while compiling latex files you need to access the most recent .tex, .ps or .pdf file. Sometimes if those file names are long it is often annoying to write them everytime. Here is a set of commands which will work on the last edited/touched file of the specified type.

alias latex. 'latex `ls -t *.tex | head -1` &'
alias emacs. 'emacs `ls -t *.tex | head -1` &'
alias pdf. 'acroread `ls -t *.pdf | head -1` &'
alias acroread. 'acroread `ls -t *.pdf | head -1` &'
alias ps2pdf. 'ps2pdf `ls -t *.ps | head -1` &'
alias lpr.. 'lpr `ls -t *.ps | head -1` &'
alias gv. 'gv `ls -t *.ps | head -1` &'
alias gvl. 'gv --orientation=landscape `ls -t *.ps | head -1` &'
alias lpr. 'lpr `ls -t *.ps | head -1` &'
alias lpdf. 'lpdf `ls -t *.pdf | head -1` &'

Combine several pdf files using ghostview

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=all.pdf -dBATCH a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf

Opening display configuration from commandline

Often in a dual head one of the screens is stuck. You can open the display configuration using

sudo /usr/bin/system-config-display

and then when nvidia refreshes ... just cancel the configuration. You will get you screens back without having to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Using grep with find

This is how you can use find to first restrict to all .r files and then use grep on them

find . -name "*.r" -exec grep "rho" '{}' \; -print

Using grep with find

This is how you can use find to first restrict to all .r files and then use grep on them

find . -name "*.r" -exec grep "rho" '{}' \; -print

Attach files to thunderbird directly from commandline

Install the script ( e.g attach.sh )


#! /bin/bash
#
# Script created by ASID
# Modified by sura
# Attach files to thunderbird

temp=""
count=0
mydir=`pwd`
for i in $*
do
count=$(( $count + 1 ))
if [ $count -eq $# ]
then
temp=${temp}file://${mydir}/${i}
else
temp=${temp}file://${mydir}/${i},
fi
done

echo $temp

if thunderbird -remote "ping()" 2> /dev/null ;
then
thunderbird -remote "xfeDoCommand(composeMessage,attachment='$temp')"
else
thunderbird --compose "attachment='$temp'"
fi

---

Then just issue the command

bash attachs.sh filenames

Setting new keyboard macro in emacs

The process is described here

Here is the final entry in your init.el file.


(fset 'newslide
[?\C-7 ?\C-7 ?% return ?% ?% ?% ?% ?% ?% ?% ? ? ?N ?E ?W ?\S- ?S ?L ?I ?D ?E return ?\C-7 ?\C-7 ?% return return ?\\ ?b ?e ?s ?{ ? ? ?} return return ?\\ ?e ?s return return])
(global-set-key [f8] 'newslide)



Now just press F8 and you will get an entry like

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%%%%%%% NEW SLIDE
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\bes{ }

\es



which I used as demarcation while preparing latex slides

WOW you can type so much using just one key stroke :)