Assign USB Drives to Folder

Each time you plug in a USB device to your Windows computer, Windows can assign a different drive letter to your device. If you have programs that rely on a fixed drive letter (e.g. portable applications on a USB drive or backups) or if you use more than one computer regularly, then it gets annoying to reset the programs' configuration after plugging in your drive or remember to plug in devices in a particular sequence. Assign USB Drives to Folder describes how to use Window's Disk Management to assign a fixed path to each device.

I wonder if it's possible to refer to a device using its volume name, which would make this method redundant?

Sed Translate / Transform / Transliterate Command

Note to self: sed's (Stream EDitor) command y/list1/list2/ to transform / transliterate each character is based on its position in list1 to a character in the same position in list2. list1 and list2 must be an explicit character list, not a regular expression (and hence, not a character class). In other words, if you enter y/[a-z]/[A-Z]/, sed will look for these characters in the input, '[', 'a', '-', 'z' and ']', to replace with '[', 'A', '-', 'Z' and ']' respectively; sed does not expand a character class [a-z] to replace with [A-Z]. Same with Posix character class names such as [:lower:] and [:upper:].

I incorrectly mixed up the idea that sed's transform command with the tr (translate) command, which supports interpreted sequences, e.g. tr [:lower:] [:upper:] will transform all lower case characters to upper case.

Obscure Cmd.exe Output Replacement (Back Tick)

With Unix shells such as bash and [t]csh, you can set the value of a variable to the result of a command using the back-tick operator (or output replacement). For example, LINES = `wc -l filename`, would set the variable LINES with the result of wc -l, which is the number of lines in filename. This technique is useful when you want pass the value of a computed variable to subsequent commands in a script.

Windows' cmd.exe also supports this feature, in a obscure way, using the for command: for /f %i in ('command') do set VARIABLE=%i. To reproduce the previous example in cmd.exe: for /f %i in ('wc -l filename') do set LINES=%i.

Notes:

• Use %%i in a script.
• Use single-quote marks to delimit a command. If you use double-quote marks, for treats the argument in parentheses as a string.

I saw this and other cmd.exe hacks somewhere but I didn't take a note of it. Grr. Remind myself to update this page when I find that site again.

More Uses of Getclip-Putclip

More uses of GnuWin32 / Cygutils tools getclip and putclip using this recipe: getclip | <command chain> | putclip.

• Copy m'th and n'th column of a table from a browser: cut -fm,n.
• Copy columns from Excel and replace tab character with space: tr \t " ".
• Capitalize letters: tr [:lower:] [:upper:]. (Duh! Enter Shift-F3 in Microsoft Word, thanks to Maria H.).
• Remove indentation from e-mail messages: sed "s/> //".
• Remove indentation from source code in Word document: sed -e "s/^ //" (5-May-2008).
• Join lines broken into multiple lines by e-mail clients: dos2unix | tr -d \n. On a Windows system, tr doesn't recognise CR-LF pairs for terminating a line, so you have to convert them to a Unix-style LF using dos2unix first (6-May-2008).
• Another way to join broken lines: tr -d \r\n using escape codes for carriage return and line feed, respectively (11-May-2008).
• Remove formatting from string: getclip | putclip. This is equivalent to Microsoft Word's Paste Special / Unformatted Text. Also to work-around an annoyance in Outlook 2003, were the Edit / Paste Special is disabled when you are responding to an HTML-formatted document (7-May-2008).
• Remove HTML / XML formatting from input: sed -e "s/<[^>]*>//g" (12-Jun-2008).

A second recipe is (for /f %i in ('getclip') do @command %i) | putclip if command cannot be used in a pipeline. Two examples are basename (return name of file in a path string) and dirname (return path string without file name).

2008-05-01: Don't simply list transformations and filters that can be done with GnuWin32 tools, but ones where existing applications (e.g. Excel, Firefox, Outlook or Word) don't have an easy way to achieve a particular action.

2012-06-25: Flatten or collapse Excel multi-column data.