Available Unix Software and Windows Tricks by Topic

• File Management: mc
  Those who 'grew up' with DOS and fell in love with the Norton Commander: It's there! (on UNIX) Only that it's called Midnight Commander (command: mc). If it's not in your path - it's in /opt/winter/bin/.

• File Viewers
  • [/local/bin/]acroread => Acrobat File Viewer (for *.pdf)
  • [/local/bin/]xdvi => Viewer for TeX Output (*.dvi)
    Note that this is a lot quicker than converting the stuff to postscript and viewing it with ghostview. However, some LaTeX gimmicks (such as included postscript figures and graphics produced by LaTeX packages such as pstricks) may not be visible.

• Gnu stuff
  • grep - Gnu's grep is available as ggrep

• Graphics
  • Viewers
    • xv - displays and converts graphics
    • netscape - also handles most graphics formats

  • Drawing Programs
    • xfig - drawing program for XWindows

  • Converters
    • xv - displays and converts many formats

    • many converters between file formats follow the convention <format1>to<format2> or <format1>2<format2> , e.g., gif2tiff, tiff2ps, pstogif, etc.

    • gs (ghostscript) - postscript interpreter; allows also a variety of file format conversions including binary format for non-postscript printers.

• Postscript and pdf (Portable Document Format; Adobe)

  	view	print	rearrange/scale	convert
  postscript	ghostview	lpr	pstops psnup	ps2pdf (gnu) distill (Adobe)
  pdf	acroread	acroread pdf2ps|lpr	acroread	acroread (Adobe) pdf2ps (gnu)

• Printing[See also the special page on printing]
  • lpr - prints a postscript file
  • lpq - checks the print queue
  • lprm - removes a print job from the queue
  • enscript - converts ascii to postscript
  • a2ps - converts ascii to postscript
  • psselect - selects range of pages from postscript file
  • pstops - scales postscript files and arranges (virtual) postscript pages on actual, physical pages.
  • ghostview - xwindows postscript viewer
  • printman - prints a man page. Type printman -help (-h will not work!) for instructions.
  • cnprint - converts EUC files to postscript and prints them. Ask Ulrich Germann for details.
  • jprint - prints japanese text files

• Plotters
  • dot - plotting program

  • gnuplot - gnu plotting program: creates quality 2D and 3D plots of data

• Screen Shots alias Window Dumps
  • Unix:
    • xv - can also be used for screendumps. Start xv, make a right click into the xv window to get the xv control panel. Click on `grab', then click on the window that you want to copy. Its frame should blink briefly, and a copy of the window should pop up somewhere else on the screen. Click on `save' in the control panel to to save the screendump in any of the formats offered.

    • xgrabsc - grabs any rectangular section of the screen that you care to specify. xwd and xpr (mentioned below) are less powerful and are listed just in case you can't use xgrabsc. This tool also offers the option to directly produce encapsulated postscript (switch -eps), which is perfect for inclusion in other documents, and reverse printing for windows with bright colors on a dark background.

    • xwd - prints an image of the window specified to a file (or STDOUT)
      sample of usage:
      xwd -out <filename>
      Stop! You're not done yet. Now click in the window that you would like to copy. Your computer should beep first once and a little later twice. Now you're done.

    • xpr - sends a file produced by xwd to the printer.
      Use the switch -rv for reversing colors when printing screendumps with a dark background and bright colors. See manpage for details.

  • MS Windows:
    Press <ALT>+<PRINT>. This saves a bitmap of the window currently active in the scratchpad. Now switch to an application that can deal with bitmaps (such as Word) and press <SHIFT>+<INSERT> to insert the bitmap to your application.