Monday, October 30, 2006
ftp client
I work in a distributed computing environment. At any particular time I may use one of the linux machines in my home office, I may login to a machine in San Jose or I may need to login to a machine in Isreal depending on what I'm doing. The machines in San Jose and Israel both use my same username and password but the home directories are not the same, they are unique in each place. Sometimes I will also work from my laptop using VMware for linux. Given these 4 unique filesystems I am forced to spend time moving files back and forth depending on the task at hand.
To do this I often turn to another of the useful toolbars (that is hiden by default) in InnerLoop called the ftp client.
To activate it right click on any of the toolbars to bring up the toolbar list and select ftp client. There is also a toolbar called just ftp, but I don't find this one as useful.
Once the toolbar is open hit the button with the green + sign and then hit Add to setup a new profile. Enter the data to connect to the machine you want to reach and then connect. This profile will be saved (even though I don't see it on the pull-down when I come back next time) and when I come back next time I hit the green + sign again and connect.
Once connected I feel like I want to drag-and-drop files back and forth, but that won't work. The key is to right click the mouse and use the upload and download menu items (depending which side you select file or directories on). You can also use the right click to delete files, rename them, create new directories, and more.
Give it a try next time you need to ftp or use ssh to move data back and forth.
I work in a distributed computing environment. At any particular time I may use one of the linux machines in my home office, I may login to a machine in San Jose or I may need to login to a machine in Isreal depending on what I'm doing. The machines in San Jose and Israel both use my same username and password but the home directories are not the same, they are unique in each place. Sometimes I will also work from my laptop using VMware for linux. Given these 4 unique filesystems I am forced to spend time moving files back and forth depending on the task at hand.
To do this I often turn to another of the useful toolbars (that is hiden by default) in InnerLoop called the ftp client.
To activate it right click on any of the toolbars to bring up the toolbar list and select ftp client. There is also a toolbar called just ftp, but I don't find this one as useful.
Once the toolbar is open hit the button with the green + sign and then hit Add to setup a new profile. Enter the data to connect to the machine you want to reach and then connect. This profile will be saved (even though I don't see it on the pull-down when I come back next time) and when I come back next time I hit the green + sign again and connect.
Once connected I feel like I want to drag-and-drop files back and forth, but that won't work. The key is to right click the mouse and use the upload and download menu items (depending which side you select file or directories on). You can also use the right click to delete files, rename them, create new directories, and more.
Give it a try next time you need to ftp or use ssh to move data back and forth.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Diffing
InnerLoop has an excellent diff cool called DIFFzilla. The name is actually trademarked. You can access it from the Tools -> File Difference menu item.
It can be used to diff just about anything, text files, a directory tree, binary files, and if you have a revision control system setup it can even diff against different versions in the repository. It does a very good job in aligning the files you are diffing to clearly display what is the same and what is not.
One of the cool things about DIFFzilla is you can edit the files right in the diff window. If you see something that needs to be changed there is no reason to go back to the edit window to make change, just change it right in the diff display and save, very cool.
You can also run just the diff engine from the command line. If you like to work at the shell prompt and need to do a diff there is no reason to settle for the unix diff. After 15 years I still forget if the first or the second file has the <> on the diff results when using unix diff. You can run DIFFzilla by doing
% vsdiff file1 file2
If you want to do more complex things just type vsdiff and the configuration dialog will open and you can setup what you want to diff.
Since my brain shuts off sometimes and I resort to old habits I just alias diff to vsdiff.
Give it a try.
InnerLoop has an excellent diff cool called DIFFzilla. The name is actually trademarked. You can access it from the Tools -> File Difference menu item.
It can be used to diff just about anything, text files, a directory tree, binary files, and if you have a revision control system setup it can even diff against different versions in the repository. It does a very good job in aligning the files you are diffing to clearly display what is the same and what is not.
One of the cool things about DIFFzilla is you can edit the files right in the diff window. If you see something that needs to be changed there is no reason to go back to the edit window to make change, just change it right in the diff display and save, very cool.
You can also run just the diff engine from the command line. If you like to work at the shell prompt and need to do a diff there is no reason to settle for the unix diff. After 15 years I still forget if the first or the second file has the <> on the diff results when using unix diff. You can run DIFFzilla by doing
% vsdiff file1 file2
If you want to do more complex things just type vsdiff and the configuration dialog will open and you can setup what you want to diff.
Since my brain shuts off sometimes and I resort to old habits I just alias diff to vsdiff.
Give it a try.
