Category Archives: Command line

“lp” and the automation of printing PDF’s

Posted on September 13, 2016 by DocDock

Apache FOP is actually really neat.  With a few jar files, an xslt file and a xml file it is possible to create PDF file which can then be viewed or printed on any PC without any loss of formatting.  … Continue reading →

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Security through obscurity – pdf removing passwords

Posted on September 7, 2016 by DocDock

Initially I was not planning on writing about how to crack pdf passwords.  After all, that would be irresponsible much in the way giving a knife to a small child is irresponsible – right? Well, simply typing in the following … Continue reading →

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When all you have is a hammer …

Posted on July 18, 2016 by DocDock

I was speaking with a friend the other day and he was telling about this crazy thing that was being done in his department.  There was a task that needed to be done usually once a day and it was … Continue reading →

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Punishment for laziness – root password recovery

Posted on July 14, 2016 by DocDock

I had a new idea for adding one more computer to my life.  The task was to actually provide some fun new functionality to my family and I attacked the task. At the beginning, I needed to log in as … Continue reading →

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command line fun – spaces and arguments

Posted on July 4, 2016 by DocDock

I normally get to control most aspects of the program.  The most important yet trivial is the parameters that are being passed to the program.  Because I know what I want it is usually possible to coerce the calling script … Continue reading →

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command line fun – getting to the base of things

Posted on June 1, 2016 by DocDock

Just a short time back I received a mail from a colleague with an error message.  The question from him was about the error and more importantly was this my program.  I did find some code that generated the same … Continue reading →

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bash – its not a bug its a feature

Posted on May 26, 2016 by DocDock

It’s not a bug it’s a feature It has been said so many times it goes beyond cliche.  It is really easy to try and explain away odd behaviors as some sort of esoteric feature It took a while before I … Continue reading →

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command line fun – listing and sorting

Posted on May 6, 2016 by DocDock

Linux is not Unix yet it is very similar.  They are so similar I never really notice the difference, even when writing scripts.  I needed to get a list of sorted files, so I tried the usual commands. ls -lS … Continue reading →

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Oracle and batch reporting

Posted on April 28, 2016 by DocDock

My first real exposure to a real database was Sybase.  It actually is a fairly nice “little” database that you can come to grips with.  I mean little when compared to behemoth that is Oracle.  I don’t want to go … Continue reading →

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command line fun – more fun with sftp

Posted on April 28, 2016 by DocDock

A few days back we needed to copy some files around in the production environment and the task was given to me.  It was one of those rather simple tasks as in the email was some examples from a colleague … Continue reading →

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