The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘*nix’ Category

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mutool: all purpose tool for dealing with PDF files | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/23

Sometimes I feel like having lived under a rock for ages despite trying to live the command-line life as much as possible.

Anyway: not that long ago I learned about [Wayback/Archive] mutool: all purpose tool for dealing with PDF files | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier

It is part of [Wayback/Archive] Package mupdf – man pages | ManKier which also has [Wayback/Archive] mupdf: MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer written in portable C | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier.

MuPDF – a kind of sibling to GhostScript – lives at [Wayback/Archive] MuPDF: The ultimate library for managing PDF documents.

The below query got me to [Wayback/Archive] mupdf/docs/man/mutool.1 at master · ccxvii/mupdf · GitHub in the “wrong” repository [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ccxvii/mupdf: mirrored from git://git.ghostscript.com/mupdf.git

The actual repositories are at:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Console (command prompt window), Development, PDF, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Managing the Mail Queue Files and Directories

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/15

I wish I had found this overview eons ago: [Wayback/Archive] Managing the Mail Queue Files and Directories.

The most important bits on the various kinds of files that appear in your message queue:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User, sendmail | Leave a Comment »

linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow (plus some Twitter scraping tricks)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/06

Sometimes I need [Wayback/Archive] Redirect Checker | Check your Statuscode 301 vs 302 on the command-line, so cURL to the rescue: [Wayback/Archive] linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow. The relevant portions of answers and comments further below.

TL;DR:

Since I prefer verbose command-line arguments (you can find them at the [Wayback/Archive] curl – How To Use on-line man page) especially in scripts this HTTP GET request is what works with Twitter:

% curl --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
https://x.com/anyuser/status/20

This failed (twitter dislikes HTTP HEAD requests):

% curl --head --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20

Notes

Given so many of my scripts now run on zsh, I added the new-line because of command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow. You can strip that bit.

Note that these do not perform client side redirects, so they do not return the ultimate originating URL https://x.com/jack/status/20 (which was the first ever Tweet on what was back then called twttr) as Twitter on the client-side overwrites window.location.href with the final URL. Similar behaviour for getting the Twitter user handle of a Twitter user ID, more on Twitter tricks below.

Tweet by TweetID trick via [Wayback/Archive] Accessing a tweet using only its ID (and without the Twitter API) – Bram.us.

Further reading (thanks [Wayback/Archive] vise, [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Stenberg, [Wayback/Archive] Ivan, [Wayback/Archive] AndrewF, [Wayback/Archive] Roger Campanera, and [Wayback/Archive] Dave Baird):

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Batch-Files, Bookmarklet, Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, CSS, cURL, Development, Event, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, TCP, Twitter, Web Browsers, Web Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Windows: editing the RLU list of vncviewer.exe

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/04

Every now and then you make a typo when accessing remote systems through UltraVNC  vncviewer.exe (I did the worst: thinking I had hit Enter to select the most recent connection, but typing a password instead).

I could not find settings in the registry, nor a vncviewer.ini file, so I used Process Monitor and filtered all events for the most recently started vncviewer.exe to figure out where it would store configuration files.

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User, VNC/Virtual_Network_Computing, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/31

I try to stay on the default shells of environments as much as possible, especially as that makes life easier when needing to work on an non-customised system.

Apple switched back from an ancient latest GPLv2 version 3.2 of bash (they regard newer GPLv3 as toxic to their revenue stream¹), introduced MIT-license based zsh and introduced a bash nag screen a few years ago forcing users to switch. Suppressing that message reliably is trickier than you might think².

After so many years of bash, I still stumble over things that zsh does differently: [Wayback/Archive] command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Travis and [Wayback/Archive] zaTricky) is a “feature” with a simple workaround for cURL:

This is a zsh feature that prints a percent-and-newline after a command completes if that command does not already include a newline at the end of its output. If zsh did not do this, you would either not ever notice the fact that the command didn’t print a newline – or you’d see zsh’s command prompt not start on the margin and think it was a bug in zsh.

…

$ curl http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7   
Cisco Systems, Inc%     
$ curl -w '\n' http://api.macvendors.com/0015c7
Cisco Systems, Inc

…

Since the above example now writes a redirect messages (good bye HTTP, welcome HTTPS), and I very much dislike short command-line parameters, here is version with the long form of the [Wayback/Archive] curl -w or --write-out parameter :

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, bash, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, zsh | Leave a Comment »

A PDF can run JavaScript, which means it can hosts a VM for Linux or Doom

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/12

A few years back, this question popped up: [Wayback/Archive] Embedding JS into PDF : cybersecurity

The answer is yes, and you can take this far. Virtualisation far. Which is what these repositories – both by [Wayback/Archive] ading2210 · GitHub – did:

Via [Wayback/Archive] Angry Nerds Podcast – YouTube -> [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds 235 – Automasturbator – YouTube -> 1540 seconds at [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds 235 – Automasturbator – YouTube – t=5040s

1:24:00 Hadden we Doom in PDF-vorm al eens genoemd? https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf Er is een vervolg, nu gewoon linux draaien in een PDF https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf Dus in feite gewoon een PDF-VMetje

Related:

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Posted in *nix, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Linux, Power User, Software Development, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »

unix – How come is this command returning “GET A LIFE!”? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/11

Didn’t know nx had a scriptable RPN command-line calculator dc (for Desk Calculator) which does not seem to need white space characters in the input stream or input file.

It likely is a source for command-injection attacks given the question [Wayback/Archive] unix – How come is this command returning “GET A LIFE!”? – Stack Overflow, so I did a bit of digging and found this great platform:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

What is the Python 3 equivalent of “python -m SimpleHTTPServer” – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/29

Now that Python 2 has been dead for long enough (has it been unsupported for 5 years? yes it has: [Wayback/Archive] Status of Python Versions), it was finally time to change my alias for running a local web-server to serve files from a directory (:

So, from [Wayback/Archive] What is the Python 3 equivalent of “python -m SimpleHTTPServer” – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] ryanbraganza, [Wayback/Archive] k.avinash and [Wayback/Archive] Petr Viktorin):

python -m http.server 8000, it will start the server on port 8000

Docs with the migration hints: [Wayback/Archive] 20.19. SimpleHTTPServer — Simple HTTP request handler — Python 2.7.18 documentation

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Interesting take by Florian Roth on Twitter: “First security application I install on … “” covering various platforms (both server and workstation) with tools that are easy and quick to install

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/26

[Wayback/Archive] Florian Roth on Twitter: “First security application I install on … macOS: LittleSnitch Linux Server: Fail2ban Linux Workstation: etckeeper Windows Workstation: GlassWire Windows Server: Sysmon — What are yours?”

Full thread at [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @cyb3rops on Thread Reader App

Some interesting responses to the original tweet, hence me saving it.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, BSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Upptime: GitHub-powered open-source uptime monitor and status page

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/14

I wonder how long this can be hosted on GitHub. Will start using it, just to learn more about the GitHub computing infrastructure.

Links:

--jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, GitHub, Hosting, Infrastructure, Monitoring, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

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