netrw and invalid certificates

Don’t trust invalid certificates. Only do this sort of workaround if you really know what you’re dealing with is okay.

Sometimes I just need to reference the source of an HTML or CSS file online without writing to it. If I need to do this while I’m editing something else in vim, my best course of action is to open a split in vim and do it there. Even if I’m not working on said thing in vim, that is the way that I’m most comfortable moving around in documents, so there’s still a good chance I want to open my source file there.

netrw, the default1 file explorer for vim, handles HTTP and HTTPS. By default, it does this using whichever of the following it finds first: elinks, links, curl, wget, or fetch. At work, we’re going through an HTTPS transition, and at least for the time being, the certificates are… not quite right. Not sure what the discrepancy is (it’s not my problem), but strict clients are wary. This includes curl and wget. When I went to view files via HTTPS in vim, I was presented with errors. This obviously wasn’t vim’s fault, but it took a bit of doing to figure out exactly how these elements interacted and how to modify the behavior of what is (at least originally) perceived as netrw.

When netrw opens up a remote connection, it essentially just opens up a temporary file, and runs a command that uses that temporary file as input or output depending on whether the command is a read or write operation. As previously mentioned, netrw looks for elinks, links, curl, wget, and fetch. My cygwin install has curl and wget, but none of the others. It also has lynx, which I’ll briefly discuss at the end. I don’t know if elinks or links can be set to ignore certificate issues, but I don’t believe so. curl and wget can, however.

We set this up in vim by modifying netrw_HTTP_cmd, keeping in mind that netrw is going to spit out a temporary file name to read in. So we can’t output to STDOUT, we need to end with a file destination. For curl, we can very simply use :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="curl -k". For wget, we need to specify output, tell it not to verify certs, and otherwise run quietly: :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="wget --no-check-certificate -q -O".

I don’t have an environment handy with links or elinks, but glancing over the manpages leads me to believe this isn’t an option with either. It isn’t with lynx either, but in playing with it, I still think this is useful: for a system with lynx but not any of the default HTTP(s) handlers, netrw can use lynx via :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="lynx -source >". Also interesting is that lynx (and presumably links and elinks via different flags) can be used to pull parsed content into vim: :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="lynx -dump >".


Separating cd and pushd

While much of this post applies to bash, I am a zsh user and this was written from that standpoint.

One piece of advice that I’ve seen a lot in discussions on really tricking out one’s UNIX (&c.) shell is either setting an alias from cd to pushd or turning on a shell option that accomplishes this1. Sometimes the plan includes other aliases or functions to move around on the directory stack, and the general sell is that now you have something akin to back/forward buttons in a web browser. This all seems to be based on the false premise that pushd is better than cd, when the reality is that they simply serve different purposes. I think that taking cd out of the picture and throwing everything onto the directory stack greatly reduces the stack’s usefulness. So this strategy simultaneously restricts the user to one paradigm and then makes that paradigm worse.

It’s worth starting from the beginning here. cd changes directories and that’s about it. You start here, tell it to go there, now you’re there. pushd does the same thing, but instead of just launching the previous directory into the ether, it pushes it onto a last in, first out directory stack. pushd is helped by two other commands – popd to pop a directory from the stack, and dirs to view the stack.

% mkdir foo bar baz
% for i in ./*; pushd $i && pushd
% dirs -v
0       ~/test
1       ~/test/foo
2       ~/test/baz
3       ~/test/bar

dirs is a useful enough command, but its -v option makes its output considerably better. The leading number is where a given entry is on the stack, this is globbed with a tilde. ~0 is always the present working directory ($PWD). You’ll see in my little snippet above that in addition to pushding my way into the three directories, I also call pushd on its own, with no arguments. This basically just instructs pushd to flip between ~0 and ~1:

% pushd; dirs -v
0       ~/test/foo
1       ~/test
2       ~/test/baz
3       ~/test/bar

This is very handy when working between two directories, and one reason why I think having a deliberate and curated directory stack is far more useful than every directory you’ve ever cded into. The other big reason is the tilde glob:

% touch ~3/xyzzy
% find .. -name xyzzy
../bar/xyzzy

So the directory stack allows you to do two important things: easily jump between predetermined directories, and easily access predetermined directories. This feels much more like a bookmark situation than a history situation. And while zsh (and presumably bash) has other tricks up its sleeves that let users make easy use of predetermined directories, the directory stack does this very well in a temporary, ad hoc fashion. cd actually gives us one level of history as well, via the variable $OLDPWD, which is set whenever $PWD changes. One can do cd - to jump back to $OLDPWD.

zsh has one more trick up its sleeve when it comes to the directory stack. Using the tilde notation, we can easily change into directories from our stack. But since this is basically just a glob, the shell just evaluates it and says ‘okay, we’re going here now’:

% pushd ~1; dirs -v
0       ~/test
1       ~/test/foo
2       ~/test
3       ~/test/baz
4       ~/test/bar

Doing this can create a lot of redundant entries on the stack, and then we start to get back to the cluttered stack problem that started this whole thing. But the cd and pushd builtins in zsh know another special sort of notation, plus and minus. Plus counts up from zero (and therefore lines up with the numbers used in tilde notation and displayed using dirs -v), whereas minus counts backward from the bottom of the stack. Using this notation with either cd or pushd (it is a feature of these builtins and not a true glob) essentially pops the selected item off of the stack before evaluating it.

% cd +3; dirs -v
0       ~/test/baz
1       ~/test/foo
2       ~/test
3       ~/test/bar
% pushd -0; dirs -v
0       ~/test/bar
1       ~/test/baz
2       ~/test/foo
3       ~/test

…and this pretty much brings the stack concept full circle, and hopefully hits home why it makes far more sense to curate this stack versus automatically populating it whenever you change directories.


Extracting JPEGs from PDFs

I’m not really making a series of ‘things your hex editor is good for’, I swear, but one more use case that comes up frequently enough in my day-to-day life is extracting JPEGs from PDF files. This can be scripted simply enough, but I find doing these things manually from time to time to be a valuable learning experience.

PDF is a heck of a file format, but we really only need to know a few things right now. PDFs are made up of objects, and some of these objects (JPEGs included) are stream objects. Stream objects always have some relevant data stored in a thing called a dictionary, and this includes two bits of data we need to get our JPEG: the Filter tells the viewer how to interpret the stream, and the Length tells us how long, in bytes, the data is. The filter for JPEGs is ‘DCTDecode’, so we can open up a PDF in a hex editor (I’ll be using bvi again) and search for this string to find a JPEG. Before we do, one final thing we should know is that streams begin immediately after an End Of Line (EOL) marker following the word ‘stream’. EOL in a PDF should always be two bytes – 0D 0A or CR LF.

/DCTDecodeEnter

00002E80  6C 74 65 72 2F 44 43 54 44 65 63 6F 64 65 2F 48 lter/DCTDecode/H
00002E90  65 69 67 68 74 20 31 31 39 2F 4C 65 6E 67 74 68 eight 119/Length
00002EA0  20 35 35 33 33 2F 4E 61 6D 65 2F 58 2F 53 75 62  5533/Name/X/Sub
00002EB0  74 79 70 65 2F 49 6D 61 67 65 2F 54 79 70 65 2F type/Image/Type/
00002EC0  58 4F 62 6A 65 63 74 2F 57 69 64 74 68 20 31 32 XObject/Width 12
00002ED0  31 3E 3E 73 74 72 65 61 6D 0D 0A FF D8 FF EE 00 1>>stream.......
/DCTDecode                                     00002E85  \104 0x44  68 'D'

This finds the next ‘DCTDecode’ stream object and puts us on that leading ’D’, byte offset 2E85 (decimal 11909) in this instance. Glancing ahead a bit, we can see that the Length is 5533 bytes. If we then search for ‘stream’, (/streamEnter), we’ll be placed at byte offset 2ED3 (decimal 11987). The word ‘stream’ is 6 bytes, and we need to add an additional 2 bytes for the EOL. This means our JPEG data starts at byte offset 11995 and is 5533 bytes long.

How, then, to extract this data? It may not be everyone’s favorite tool, but dd fits the bill perfectly. It allows us to input a file, start at a byte offset, go to a byte offset, and output the resulting chunk of file – just what we want. Assuming our file is ‘test.pdf,’ we can output ‘test.jpg’ like…

dd bs=1 skip=11995 count=5533 if=test.pdf of=test.jpg

bs=1 sets our block size to 1 byte (which is important, dd is largely used for volume-level operations where blocks are larger). skip skips ahead however many bytes, essentially the initial offset. count tells it how many bytes to read. if and of are input and output files respectively. dd doesn’t follow normal Unix flag conventions, there are no prefixing dashes and those equal signs are quite atypical, and dd is quite powerful, so it’s always worth reading the manpage.


Semaphore and sips redux

In this article, I do sem -j +5, allowing 5 jobs to run at a time. -j can be used with integers, percents, and +/– values such that one can say -j +0 -j -1 to run one fewer job than their available cores (+0), etc.

I was going to simply edit my last post, but this might warrant its own, as it’s really more about sem and parallel than it is sips. parallel’s manpage describes it as ‘a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers’. It’s kind of a better version of xargs, and it is super powerful. The manpage starts early with a recommendation to watch a series of tutorials on YouTube and continues on to example after example after example. It’s intense.

In my previous post, I suggested using sem for easy parallel execution of sips conversions. sem is really just an alias for parallel --semaphore, described by its manpage (yes, it gets its own manpage) as a ‘counting semaphore [that] simply waits for a semaphore to become available and then runs the command given’. It’s a convenient and fairly accessible way to parallelize tasks. Backing up for a second, it does have its own manpage, which focuses on some of the specifics about how it queues things up, how it waits to execute tasks, etc. It does this using toilet metaphors, which is a whole other conversation, but for the most part it’s fairly clear, and it’s what I tend to reference when I’m figuring something out using sem.

In my last post (and in years of converting things this way), I had to decide between automating the cleanup/rm process or parallelizing the sips calls. The problem is, if you do this:

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/.tif/.png}" && rm "$i"

…the parallelism gets all thrown off. sem executes, cues up sips, presumably exits 0, and then rm destroys the file before sem even gets the chance to spawn sips. None of the files exist, and sips has nothing to convert. The sem manpage doesn’t really address chaining commands in this manner, presumably it would be too difficult to fit into a toilet metaphor. But it occurred to me that I might come up with the answer if I just looked through enough of the examples in the parallel manpage (worth noting that a lot of the parallel syntax is specific to not being run in semaphore mode). The solution is facepalmingly simple: wrap the && in double quotes:

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/.tif/.png}" "&&" rm "$i"

…which works a charm. We could take this even further and feed the PNGs directly into optipng:

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/.tif/.png}" "&&" rm "$i" "&&" optipng "${i/.tif/.png}"

…or potentially adding optipng to the sem queue instead:

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/.tif/.png}" "&&" rm "$i" "&&" sem -j +5 optipng "${i/.tif/.png}"

…I’m really not sure which is better (and I don’t think time will help me since sem technically exits pretty quickly).


Darwin image conversion via sips

I use Lightroom for all of my photo ‘development’ and library management needs. Generally speaking, it is great software. Despite being horribly nonstandard (that is, using nonnative widgets), it is the only example of good UI/UX that I’ve seen out of Adobe in… at least a decade. I’ll be perfectly honest right now: I hate Adobe with a passion otherwise entirely unknown to me. About 85-90% of my professional life is spent in Acrobat Pro, which gets substantially worse every major release. I would guess that around 40% of my be-creative-just-to-keep-my-head-screwed-on time is spent in various pieces of CC (which, subscription model is just one more fuck-you, Adobe). But Lightroom has always been special. I beta tested the first release, and even then I knew… this was the rare excuse for violating so many native UI conventions. This made sense.

Okay, from that rant we come up with: thumbs-down to Adobe, but thumbs-up to Lightroom. But there’s one thing that Lightroom has never opted to solve, despite so many cries, and that is PNG export. Especially with so many photographers (myself included) using flickr, which reencodes TIFFs to JPEGs, but leaves the equally lossless PNG files alone, it is ridiculous that the Lightroom team refuses to incorporate a PNG export plugin. Just one more ’RE: stop making garbage’ memo that I need to forward to the clowns at Adobe.

All of this to just come to my one-liner solution for Mac users… sips is the CLI/Darwin equivalent of the image conversion software that MacOS uses for conversion in Preview, etc. The manpage is available online, conveniently. But my use is very simple – make a bunch of supid TIFFs into PNGs.

for i in ./*.tif ; sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/tif/png}" && rm "$i"

…is the basic line that I use on a directory full of TIFFs output from Lightroom. Note that this is zsh, and I’m not 100% positive that the variable substitution is valid bash. Lightroom seemingly outputs some gross TIFFs, and sips throws up an error for every file, but still exits 0, and spits out a valid PNG. sips does not do parallelism, so a better way to handle this may be (using semaphore):

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/tif/png}"

…and then cleaning up the TIFFs afterward (rm ./*.tif). Either way. There’s probably a way to do both using flocks or some such, but I haven’t put much time into that race condition.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of image conversion packages out there (ImageMagick comes to mind), but if you’re on MacOS/Darwin… why not use the builtins if they function? And sips does, in a clean and simple way. While it certainly isn’t a portable solution, it’s worth knowing about for anyone who does image work on a Mac and feels comfortable in the CLI.


Of lynx and curl

I use zsh, and some aspects of this article may be zsh specific, particularly the substitution trick. bash has similar ways to achieve these goals, but I won’t be going into anything bash-specific here.

At work, I was recently tasked with archiving several thousand records from a soon-to-be-mercifully-destroyed Lotus Notes database. Why they didn’t simply ask the DBA to do this is beyond me (just kidding, it almost certainly has to do with my time being less valuable, results be damned). No mind, however, as the puzzle was a welcome one, as was the opportunity to exercise my Unix (well, cygwin in this case) chops a bit. The exercise became a simple one once I realized the database had a web server available to me, and that copies of the individual record web views would suffice. A simple pairing of lynx and curl easily got me what I needed, and I realized that I use these two in tandem quite often. Here’s the breakdown:

There are two basic steps to this process: use lynx to generate a list of links, and use curl to download them. There are other means of doing this, particularly when multiple depths need to be spidered. I like the control and safety afforded to me by this two-step process, however, so for situations where it works, it tends to be my go-to. To start, lynx --dump 'http://brhfl.com' will print out a clean, human-readable version of my homepage, with a list of all the links at the bottom, formatted like

1. http://brhfl.com/#content
2. http://brhfl.com/
3. http://brhfl.com/./about/
4. http://brhfl.com/./categories/
5. http://brhfl.com/./post/

…and so on (note to self: those ./ URLs function fine, and web browsers seem to transparently ignore them, but… maybe fix that?). For our purposes, we don’t want the formatted page, nor do we want the reference numbers. awk helps us here: lynx --dump 'http://brhfl.com' | awk '/http/{print $2}' looks for lines containing ‘http’, and only prints the second element in the line (default field separator being a space).

http://brhfl.com/#content
http://brhfl.com/
http://brhfl.com/./about/
http://brhfl.com/./categories/
http://brhfl.com/./post/

…et cetera. For my purposes, I was able to single out only the links to records in my database by matching a second pattern. If we only wanted to return links to my ‘categories’ pages, we could do lynx --dump 'http://brhfl.com' | awk '/http/&&/categories/{print $2}', using a boolean AND to match both patterns.

http://brhfl.com/./categories/
http://brhfl.com/./categories/apple/
http://brhfl.com/./categories/board-games/
http://brhfl.com/./categories/calculator/
http://brhfl.com/./categories/card-games/

…and so on. Belaboring this any further would be more a primer on awk than anything, but it is necessary1 for turning lynx --dump into a viable list of URLs. While this seems like a clumsy first step, it’s part of the reason I like this two-step approach: my list of URLs is a very real thing that can be reviewed, modified, filtered, &c. before curl ever downloads a byte. All of the above examples print to stdout, so something more like lynx --dump 'http://brhfl.com' | awk '/http/&&/categories/{print $2}' >> categories-urls would (appending to and not clobbering) store my URLs in a file. Then it’s on to curl. for i in $(< categories-urls); curl -O "$i" worked just fine2 for my database capture, but our example here would be less than ideal because of the pretty URLs. curl will, in fact, return

curl: Remote file name has no length!

…and stop right there. This is because the -O option simplifies things by saving the local copy of the file with the remote file’s name. If we want to (or need to) name the files ourselves, we use the lowercase -o filename instead. While this would be a great place to learn more about awk3, we can actually cheat a bit here and let the shell help us. zsh has a tail-matching substitution built in, used much like basename to get the tail end of a path. Since URLs are just paths, we can do the same thing here. To test this, we can for i in $(< categories-urls); echo ${i:t}.html and get

categories.html
apple.html
board-games.html
calculator.html
card-games.html

…blah, blah, blah. This seems to work, so all we need to do is plug it in to our curl command, for i in $(< categories-urls); (curl -o "${i:t}".html "$i"; sleep 2). I added the two seconds of sleep when I did my db crawl so that I wasn’t hammering the aging server. I doubt it would have made a difference so long as I wasn’t making all of these requests in parallel, but I had other things to work on while it did its thing anyway.

One more reason I like this approach to grabbing URLs – as we’re pulling things, we can very easily sort out the failed requests using curl -f, which returns a nonzero exit status upon failure. We can use this in tandem with the shell’s boolean OR to build a new list of URLs that have failed: (i="http://brhfl.com/fail"; curl -fo "${i:t}".html "$i" || echo "$i" >> failed-category-urls) gives us…

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
~% < fail.html
zsh: no such file or directory: fail.html
zsh: exit 1      < fail.html
~% < failed-category-urls
http://brhfl.com/fail

…which we can then run through curl again, if we’d like, to get the resulting status codes of these URLs: for i in $(< failed-category-urls); (printf "$i", >> failed-category-status-codes.csv; curl -o /dev/null --location --silent --head --write-out '%{http_code}\n' "$i" >> failed-category-status-codes.csv)4. < failed-category-status-codes.csv in this case gives us

http://brhfl.com/fail,404

…which we’re free to do what we want with. Which, in this case, is probably nothing. But it’s a good one-liner anyway.


Job Control

This is an old post from an old blog; assets may be missing, links may be broken, and my opinions may differ considerably by this point. Notably, I use zsh as my primary shell these days, which has out-of-the-box support for what I set out to accomplish here (setopt auto_continue).
If you haven't already, it's probably a good idea to read my previous post. The plan, of course, was to work on z, my shell script to assist me with multitasking and Unix job control. I am working on z, but while I was spending a lot of time thinking about z, I was spending just as much time implementing something additional. Two additional things, to be exact. It's worth mentioning again that my shell of choice is fish1, and therefore everything that follows is written for fish.

ep

This is an old post from an old blog; assets may be missing, links may be broken, and my opinions may differ considerably by this point…

I spend a good deal of time inside a terminal. Text-based apps are powerful, when you know what you're doing, and fast (also when you know what you're doing, I suppose). If an equivalent Cocoa or X11 GUI tool offers me little advantage, I'm probably going to stick to either a CLI- or TUI-based piece of software. One of the more important, taken-for-granted pieces of the command line environment is that of the pager. Typically, one would use something like more or less for their pager. For a while, I used w3m as my pager, as well as my text-based web browser. Then Snow Leopard came out, and everything from MacPorts got totally jacked up and left much of my system jacked up as well. Parts of it I've fixed, other parts I've been lazy about. For that reason, or perhaps not, I have transitioned to ELinks as my text-based web browser. Today, after recent discussions with a friend regarding w3m and ELinks, I had a thought - why not use ELinks as my pager as well?