A non-breaking space (NBSP) is a special kind of whitespace. It's an invisible signal that tells a text-processing program to avoid replacing that space with a linefeed or carriage return. For example, if you wrote "2 kg" in LibreOffice Writer and didn't want the "2" to be at…

There's always more than one way to do a job in the shell, and there may not be One Best Way to do that job, either. Nevertheless, different commands with the same output can differ in how long they take, how much memory they use and how hard they make the CPU work. Out of curiosity I trialled 6…

Do you translate blocks of text by copying them and pasting into Google Translate in a browser? If you do, the script explained here might save you a lot of work. At the core The script relies on translate-shell, a wonderful command-line utility written by Mort Yao and available in the repositories…

Several of my data-auditing scripts take a long time to execute. Until recently I had no way of knowing how long they'd take. I'd enter the command for the script, press Enter and wait. And wait. I've now discovered the pipeline viewer or pv command, which tracks the progress of my scripts. An…

Back in March 2015 I blogged about a track-changes script that reports the edits made to a tab-separated data table. The script actually generates two reports: a plain text version and a fancy HTML version. A slightly improved version of that script is on my data-cleaning website here. The script…

Each of the two file managers I use — Thunar and Xfe — allows me to open a terminal in a selected directory. In Thunar, I right-click on a directory and choose Open Terminal Here, and in Xfe I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + t. In both cases, though, the terminal window opens right on top of the fil…

Microsoft has used two different starting points on the calendar for calculating dates in different versions of their Excel spreadsheet program. Really. Microsoft explains the difference here. One version used 1 January 1900 for serial day numbering, the other used 1 January 1904. Of course, up to…

In a 2-article series here on The Linux Rain last May (part 1 and part2) I described how I used AWK to clean up rainfall data for my home town in Tasmania. The result was a file called rain3 with rainfall totals for each of the 36525 days from 1 January 1916 to 31 December 2015: In this article I…

In a 2014 Linux Rain article I describe a fast 'points plotter' for Google Earth. First I copy a list of latitude/longitudes (lat/lons) from a spreadsheet to the clipboard, then I launch a shell script with a keyboard shortcut. The script builds a KML file from the copied list and opens the KML for…

In this article I explain one way to group data items with AWK arrays. The code is a little mysterious but the results are impressive, especially in my second example! Case 1: Cricket stats The table 'runs' is tab-separated and lists the 86 national team cricket players who scored (or have so far…