Linux

Convert multiple lines into one tab-separated line using paste

24 March 2021 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I generally have a lot of text files with such content:

1
Play track
Turn Around
Unlove this track
Panic Attack
Avinash Meetoo
110 scrobbles
2
Play track
Playing the Angel
Unlove this track
Precious
Depeche Mode
101
3
Play track
The Singles 86>98
Unlove this track
Personal Jesus
Depeche Mode
98

These are the three tracks I have listened to most since I started using Last.fm way back in 2005.

What I want to achieve is to easily convert these 21 lines (3 x 7) into 3 tab-separated lines which can then be easily imported into, say, Libreoffice Calc:

1<TAB>Play track<TAB>Turn Around<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Panic Attack<TAB>Avinash Meetoo<TAB>110 scrobbles
2<TAB>Play track<TAB>Playing the Angel<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Precious<TAB>Depeche Mode<TAB>101
3<TAB>Play track<TAB>The Singles 86>98<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Personal Jesus<TAB>Depeche Mode<TAB>98

For many years, each time I had to do that, I wrote a small Awk script. But, today, thanks to RudiC on the Unix Stack Exchange, I have the perfect recipe using paste:

paste -s -d "\t\t\t\t\t\t\n" file-containing-all-the-lines.txt

Naturally, you can adjust the number of “\t” if you have fewer or more fields.

Enjoy :-)

Installing a previous version of a program in Homebrew

21 March 2021 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I’m an avid user of Homebrew on macOS.

Doing an updates rightly updates all software installed through Homebrew to their latest version as expected. But, sometimes, you might want to install the previous version of a program. Here is the correct way to do it courtesy of variar on Stack Overflow:

TAP=...    # <org>/<repo>, for example "my-org/homebrew-old"
MODULE=... # name of module you want to install, e.g. "hugo"
VERS=...   # version of $MODULE you want to install, e.g., "0.80.0"
brew tap-new $TAP
brew extract --version $VERS $MODULE $TAP
brew install $TAP/$MODULE@$VERS

An example without using the shell variables is as follows:

brew tap-new avinash/homebrew-old
brew extract --version 2.51.3 unison avinash/homebrew-old
brew install avinash/homebrew-old/unison@2.51.3

The first command creates a new tap called avinash/homebrew-old and this needs to be done only once.

This will install a previous version of unison, version 2.51.3. Incidentally, to obtain the list of versions of a specific Homebrew program (called a formula), you can use this excellent search feature of Github.

Running Puddletag on Linux distributions with limited Python 2 support

13 May 2020 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

I am a big fan of Puddletag, an audio tag editor for Linux similar to the Mp3tag Windows program. As seen above, Puddletag uses a spreadsheet-like layout which makes it quite unique in the Linux world and matches 100% with how I like tagging to be. Puddletag and I are on the same wavelength and I have been using it for some years now to curate my extensive music collection.

Unfortunately, Puddletag was written in Python 2 and relies on a number of Python 2 libraries. When I upgraded to Fedora Linux 32 a few days ago, I lost a number of those libraries as well as Puddletag (as Python 2 reached its end of life (EOL) on 1st January 2020).

Fortunately, the Linux community came to the rescue and created a corresponding AppImage which works on all new Linux distributions like Fedora 32 or Ubuntu 20.04. Get the AppImage here courtesy of Patsim and have fun!

I’ve tested it in Fedora Linux 32 and it works great!