Hello World

It’s tradition to begin a new “language” by creating a simple script to output the words “Hello World!”. That’s easy enough, just open your favorite text editor and enter the following:

#!/bin/bash
echo Hello World!

With only two lines, it couldn’t be a whole lot simpler, but that first line, #!/bin/bash, may not be immediately obvious. The first two characters (often called a hashbang) are a special signal. It tells Linux that this script should be run through the /bin/bash shell, as opposed to the C shell or Korn shell or anything else you might have installed. Without it, there’s no easy way for Linux to tell exactly what type of shell script this is. A Python script, for example, would likely start with something like #!/usr/bin/python.

After that is just the echo statement, which prints the words after it to the terminal (technically, to standard output).

Running Your Script

As is often the case with Linux, there are multiple ways to do this job. The most basic way would be to call bash manually and feed it the script file, as in

#Filename can be anything, .sh is a common practice for shell scripts.
bash myscript.sh

Clever readers may be thinking “But wait, didn’t we put that hashbang thing in so it would know to use bash? Why did I have to run bash manually?” and the answer is “You didn’t“. At least, you wouldn’t have if we had taken a moment to make the script executable on its own.

In the previous example, we launched bash and sent it the script. Now we’ll save ourselves some future time by making the script executable so we dont need to run bash manually. That’s as easy as a single command.

chmod +x myscript.sh

And now it can be run with the filename directly.

Variables and Arguments

Variables in bash can be a little more confusing than some other scripting languages, partly because they sometimes need to be prefaced with a $ character and sometimes not – depending on what you’re doing. Take the following example.

PATH=$PATH:/home/josh/scripts

We refer to the same variable, PATH, two times. Once there’s no $, but the other time there is. There are a few ways that you can remember when a $ is appropriate, but this author uses a “talking” metaphor. If I’m talking TO the variable (such as assigning it a new value) I call it by the short name, in this case PATH. If I’m talking ABOUT a variable (such as getting its current value) it gets a more formal title ($PATH). The precise reasoning and inner workings of this design are beyond the scope of this guide, so just try to remember that you need to include a $ if you’re trying to fetch the information in a variable.

Now we’re going to use a variable in our script. Change the second line to look like the following:

#!/bin/bash
echo Hello $1!

And re-run your script, but this time include your name after the script name.

Bash auto-assigns certain variables for you, including a few such as $1, $2 etc which hold each of the arguments passed to the script. Variables can be reassigned and renamed any way you wish, so you could rewrite the previous script as

#!/bin/bash
 
firstname=$1
lastname=$2
 
echo Hello $firstname $lastname!

As you can see, there are no $ signs when assigning the value to the variable, but you do need them when pulling the info out.

Conditionals and Loops

No script could get very far without the ability to analyse or loop through data. The most common method of determining a course of action is to use the if statement. It works much like you’d expect – IF something THEN do stuff ELSE do something different. This example compares the string of characters that we stored in the variable firstname and compares it to some hardcoded text. If they match, it prints special output. Otherwise, it continues as normal.

#!/bin/bash
 
firstname=$1
lastname=$2
 
if [ "$firstname" == "Josh" ]
then
  echo "What a great name"
else
  echo Hello $firstname $lastname!
fi

Finally, the next core component is bash’s ability to loop over data. The normal looping mechanisms for bash are FOR, WHILE, and UNTIL. We’ll start with while, as it’s the simplest.

#!/bin/bash 
         counter=0
         #While the counter is less than 10, keep looping
         while [  $counter -lt 50 ]; do
             echo $counter
             let counter=counter+1 
         done

That example creates a counter variable, begins a while loop, and continues looping (and adding one to the counter) until it reaches the limit, in this case 50. Anything after the done statement will execute once the loop is complete.

UNTIL operates similarly, but as the reverse of WHILE. A while loop will continue as long as its expression is true (counter less than 50). The until loop takes the opposite approach, and would be written as

until [  $counter -gt 50 ]; do

In this example, “while less than 50″ and “until greater than 50″ will have nearly identical results (the difference being that one will include the number 50 itself, and the other will not. Try it out for yourself to see which one, and why.)

Conclusion

As stated above, it would take a lot more than a single Getting Started article to fully demonstrate the power of bash scripting. The pieces shown here can be seen as the core components of how bash operates, and should suffice to show you the basic principles behind shell scripting in Linux. If you really want to get into the guts and start making some great scripts, check out GNU’s official bash reference guide here. Happy scripting!

Related Posts:

• 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
• Mastering the Bash History
• Making The Linux Command Line A Little Friendlier
• More Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts

In MSE, one of the useful feature is the ability to schedule scan at ghost hour so it can keep your computer safe, yet not interfering with your work. However, in some situations, the scheduled scan might not work as intended.

In this post, we will show you how to properly setup a task in your computer. This task will wake your computer at night, carry out the routine scan and shutdown the system after it has finished its work.

Configure MSE

First, open the Start menu and type Security Essentials:

Go to the Setting tab. Activate the “Schedule Scan” option and determine the time that you want it to run.

It’s important to configure this way so Microsoft Security Essentials will create the scheduled task and we can change it to work the way we want.

Modifing the scheduled task

Open the Task Scheduler:

Go toTask Scheduler ->Task Scheduler Library ->Microsoft Antimalware:

Rigth click the created task and select “Properties”.

Go to the Conditions tab, uncheck the option to start the task only if the computer is idle and check the option to wake the computer to run this task.

Note: For the system to wake your computer, your BIOS has to support Advanced Power Management (APM) version 1.2 or later for this to work.

Shutdown the computer after task completion

After configuring the computer to wake at ghost hour to do the scanning, you will find that there is no way to configure it to shut down. Fret noe, we have created a script that will do the job for us.

1. Open the Notepad.

2. Copy and paste the script below to the notepad:

@echo off

:start

tasklist | find "mpcmdrun.exe" /I

if %errorlevel%==0 (goto wait) else (goto start)

:wait

tasklist | find "mpcmdrun.exe" /I

if %errorlevel%==1 shutdown -s -t 60

goto wait

You should see something like this:

Save it as “%userprofile%/shutdownaftermse.bat”.

Now go again to the task, right click and select “Properties”. Go to “Actions” tab and add this script.

Select the file:

Press OK.

That’s it. Your computer will now wake to do the system scanning and shutdown after it has completed its job. What other ways do you use to schedule your scans?

Related Posts:

• Use FilerFrog To Organzie Your Files & Folders In Flash! [Windows]
• 4 Ways to Keep Your Windows PC Secure Without Paying for Third-Party Applications
• 10 Juicy Applications For Windows 7
• Get Notified Of Weather Change With AeroWeather For Windows 7

There are many ways to find out the weather condition in your city. You can go to weather.com, use weather widget or even set it on your desktop with conky. Here is yet another way that you can obtain weather information quickly: display the weather condition as a wallpaper in your desktop.

WeatherPaper is a weather based desktop wallpaper changer for Windows and Linux. It fetches the weather condition at a regular interval and display the information on your desktop as a wallpaper. It is functionality similar to the weather applet in conky (both grab the weather condition from weather.com and display the information in your desktop) except that this WeatherPaper script displays the information in the form of a wallpaper and it is customizable and visually more pleasing.

Installation

1. Go to the WeatherPaper site and download the latest version of the weatherpaper script (the latest version as of this post is 0.2.2 and the file name is 0.2.2-linux.tar.gz)

2. Extract the content of the tar file to your home folder.

3. Open a terminal and type the following:

 cd 0.2.2-linux     #the folder name might change with newer version

sudo sh install.sh

Usage

Go to “Applications -> Accessories -> WeatherPaper“.

You should see that your desktop wallpaper is immediately changed to reflect the current weather condition.

To configure the weatherpaper script, go to “Applications -> Accessories -> WP Settings Editor”

Things that you can configure include:

Service

Here is where you can start/stop the weatherpaper service. You can also make it run on startup.

Location

Here is where you enter your location so it can fetch the correct weather condition for the place you are located. You will need to enter your US zip code (if you are located in the US) or your weather location ID.

To retrieve your location ID, go to weather.com, enter your city (or country) in the search field. On the URL, you will see your weather location ID.

Themes

The weatherpaper script comes with the default tango theme that shows the various weather condition. There is no gallery or image library where you can download new themes, but you can easily create one on your own.

General

The last tab is where you configure the interval for the script to check the weather condition and whether it should display the temperature in Celcius or Farenheit.

Uninstallation

There is no uninstallation script included in the package. You can, however, download this uninstall script (thanks to António PT for creating the script) here to uninstall weatherpaper.

1. Save the uninstall.sh script to your home folder.

2. Open a terminal and type the following:

sudo sh uninstall-weatherpaper.sh

That’s all. WeatherPaper should be uninstalled.

Overall, this is a simple yet functional wallpaper script for those who need to get hold of the weather condition regularly. I don’t use it as the default though since the place I am located is sunny throughout the year. The ability to create your own wallpaper pack is also a great feature in the script. If you have created a nice wallpaper pack, feel free to share it with us in the comments.

image credit: Mooganic

Related Posts:

• Get Notified Of Weather Change With AeroWeather For Windows 7
• 5 Handy Weather Apps for iPhone Users
• How to Create Custom Wallpaper Slideshow in Ubuntu
• The Beginner Guide to Writing Linux Shell Scripts

AutoKey is a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11. It allows you to create scripts and assign hotkeys to these scripts, allowing you to execute them on demand in whatever program you are using.

Compatibility with various distro and keyboard layout

Personally I did not test it on all the Linux distro and all the different keyboard layout. However, according to the developer of Autokey:

The core part of AutoKey is sending and receiving keyboard events via the X server. It supports multiple X interfaces and should therefore be compatible with virtually any version of Linux running an X server. Full unicode support is provided and it should in theory work with any keyboard layout.

Theoretically, it should work for all Linux distros and keyboard layout.

Installation

(the following installation instruction is based on Ubuntu)

Open a terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cdekter/ppa
sudo apt-get update

For Gnome user:

sudo apt-get install autokey-gtk

For KDE users:

sudo apt-get install autokey-qt

Usage

Go to Applications -> Accessories -> Autokey.

You will see on the left pane two folders named My Phrases and Sample Scripts. The My Phrases folder is binded to the hotkey “Ctrl + F7“.

To get a feel of the capability of Autokey, open a text editor and press Ctrl + F7, you should see the context menu with Address option. When you select the Home address field, you should see the address pasted to the text editor.

Usage: creating your own hotkey

To create your own hotkey, go to File -> Create -> New Top Level Folder.

The Top Level Folder is the container for all your phrases and scripts. You can assign a hotkey to it and call it up in any applications. To assign a hotkey, simply highlight the TopLevel Folder entry and click the Set button beside the Hotkey option. You can then choose the modifier key (Ctrl, Shift, Alt or Super) and the shortcut key.

After creating the top level folder, the next thing is to create a phrase or a script.

Phrase

The Phrase is a snippet of text that you use frequently. With a quick press of the shortcut key, you can quickly insert the phrase to the document that you are working at.

Go to File -> Create -> New Phrase. Enter the phrase content in the big text area and assign a shortcut key in the Hotkey option below.

Other than assigning hotkey, you can also use a abbreviation for the phrase. For example, I have set the abbreviation “mte” to the phrase “http://maketecheasier.com”. Now I just need to type “MTE” and it will automatically be replaced with the full URL.

Scripts

For those who have knowledge of scripting, you can add your script, assign a hotkey and get it to run anywhere else. For those who know nuts about scripting, the “Record Marco” function can help you to record simple keyboard events.

Conclusion

For those who spend a lot of time on their keyboard, Autokey is a great tool to help you increase your productivity. The phrase feature improved your typing speed while the script feature help you to get more things done in shorter time. It might take some time to master the scripting, but once that is conquered, I am sure you won’t look back.

Have you tried Autokey? Let us know how did you make use of it to improve your productivity.

Image credit: bargainmoose

Related Posts:

• How to Make Autokey Works In Ubuntu Natty [Quick Tips]
• The Ultimate List of Shortcut Keys That Will Make Your Life Easier [Windows 7]
• How to Simulate Left Mouse Click With Keyboard Shortcut in Ubuntu [Quick Tip]
• The Beginner Guide to Writing Linux Shell Scripts

1. Download From YouTube

There are multiple methods for downloading YouTube videos to the local disk. This particular script was highlighted because it provides multiple download formats, and cleanly integrates into the existing YouTube interface. You can download videos in the format of your choice directly from the YouTube video page.

2. RapidShare Autowait

As the name implies, this script removes some of the hassle of downloading from RapidShare. While you’d normally have to wait until RapidShare is ready to start your download, this script will let you “just open all links in tabs and go play outside”.

3. Super iGoogle

For those who’ve always wanted to like iGoogle but were unhappy with the cluttered layout, this script comes flying to the rescue in red and blue spandex. Not only does it remove lots of clutter (sidebars, outrageously huge header, etc) it lets you specifically choose which page elements will be shown at any given time.

As a down side though, it doesn’t work cleanly with all iGoogle themes.

4. Google Image Relinker

To avoid accusations of “stealing” images, Google Image Search links to the pages which contain the images, instead of directly to the image itself. This is good for the sites hosting the images, but it can be annoying for those who have to browse through large quantities of images to find what they need. This script, and others like it, bypass the hosting site and take you directly from the search results to the image.

5. Remove All Facebook Ads

Ads are what give us many of the free things we get online, and without them there wouldn’t be great sites like MakeTechEasier. There are, however, situations where ads can get out of control and become distracting. If you want to remove Facebook’s targeted ads, this script will take care of that.

6. Last.fm Lyrics

This script works on Last.fm song pages to include the lyrics from the song. The information is pulled from Wikia which has a large user-contributed database of song lyrics.

There are thousands more user-created browser scripts available online. If you’ve got any favorites you’d like to share with us, please drop a note in the comments!

Related Posts:

• Browsers War: The Search For The Best Android Browser
• 25 Time Saving Bookmarklets You Will Want to Have in Your Browser
• How to Enhance Your Browser with Greasemonkey
• Dolphin Browser For iOS Allows You To Use Your Own Gestures

For those of you who don’t use bookmarklets or arent quite sure what they are, here is a brief description.

What are Bookmarklets?

Bookkmarklets are a tiny java script application designed to add one click functionality to your web browser. There are hundreds of different uses, many of which save the need to run a desktop program.

A few programs with bookmarklets that have been mentioned on Make Tech Easier before are:

• Webnotes
• Hootsuite
• Zementa
• Evom
• Posterous

Why Use a Bookmarklet?

The main reason to use them is to save time. As an example:

To email a copy of the Webnotes post to someone, use the “Gmail This!” bookmarklet. A window will pop up just like when the compose button in Gmail is clicked. The link and email subject are automatically added. If you want to add more to the body of the email you can explain what the link is before you email it.

Other reasons to use bookmarklets are:

• Sharing things quickly on a social media site
• Spell check
• SEO
• URL shortening
• Adding the site to a social bookmarking site (ie Delicious, Digg, Reddit)
• Subscribing to a RSS reader
• Eliminating the ads and bloat for printing

20 other useful bookmarklets

1. Share on Facebook

Share sites on your Facebook wall or send as a message

2. Share on Friendfeed

Share links on both Friendfeed and Twitter with this one bookmarklet

3. Gmail This!

If you are going to pick one from this list to try, pick this one. It will save immense amounts of time and keep distractions at a minimum.

4. Evernote

Great for the avid Evernote user. send a link with tags, web clip, and notes to the notebook of your choice. This is a very quick way to add things without keeping the page or desktop app open all the time.

5. Serendipity (Reddit)

Randomly displays a site. A lot like Stumbleupon

6. Add to RTM

Quickly add a reminder or to-do

7. Vox This!

Add content to your Vox Blog

8. Readability

If you do a lot of reading on the web, this customizable bookmarklet will rock your world. It removes the bloat and formats the text in a way that is easier for YOU to read.

9. Spell Check

Checks spelling of any page, even published pages. Any word spelled wrong or not in Firefox’s dictionary will be highlighted.

10. Subscribe in Google Reader

Fast way to add a RSS feed to your Google Reader

11. Xray

Great for web designers. Click the bookmarklet then on any item on a page. Information like dimensions, position and border is displayed.

12. Share on Tumblr

Easily share a link on Tumblr

13. BugMeNot

Use BugMeNot database of usernames and passwords to sign in to “registered users only” websites, like news sites.

14. Boxqueue

Add videos to your Boxee Queue for viewing later. You need both a Google account and Boxee account to make this bookmarklet work.

15. DiggThis!

Quickly add sites to Digg.

16. Password Generator

If you have trouble coming up with secure passwords all the time, save some time and energy by installing this bookmarklet.

17. Google Translate

Super handy for those times when you end up on a site written in a language other than your native tongue.

18. TweetBurner

You know there had to be at least one Twitter something or other in the list.

19. Pagezipper

Features like continuous scrolling and auto resizing of images for your browser window make viewing sites less work.

20. Printliminator

Eliminate items on the page you DO NOT want to print. Great for pages or blogs without a printer friendly version of the page or post.

Including the one we have previously mentioned at MakeTechEasier, here are 25 of the useful bookmarklets that you can place in your browser. These are only a small portion of what is available. All of them are made to save time or make your browsing experience more personalized or enjoyable.

What bookmarklets do you use?

Image credit suchitra prints

Related Posts:

• How to Combine Multiple Bookmarklets And Use It From Any Computer
• 6 More Greasemonkey Scripts for Your Browsing Enjoyment
• Dolphin Browser For iOS Allows You To Use Your Own Gestures
• Cocoon For Firefox Gives You A Secure And Private Browsing Session

This can be very intimidating if you have absolutely no idea what yo do next. Sure you can randomly drag actions into the window then hit run to see what happens. Odds are you will get an error or nothing will happen. After a few times of trying without success, most people give up and tell people on Twitter it sucks.

The first step in the process is to decide what you want automated. The example below is very simple. Batch Image Scale is something I use all the time. I have a couple different image scale scripts for different sizes. Setting multiple versions up may take you a few extra minutes initially, but it saves a lot of time in the future.

Create A Script

1. In your Applications folder, open Automator.app [Cmd + Shift + A]

2. In the first column on the left, choose the an application. When you select an application, the Actions in the second column change.

3. Select the Action you would like to perform. A good place to start is an action like Ask for Finder Item. When setting up a Workflow where there may be multiple files or folders involved, make sure to check Allow Multiple Selection.

4. In some cases a warning box may appear. If this does happen, read it carefully. In this case, the pop up is asking if I want to copy the files and make the changes to the copies. Making the changes to the copies will preserved if anything were to go wrong.

5. In the far left column, click the Preview app. Drag the Scale Images action to the window.

6. Select the pixel or percentage you would like the image scaled to. In this case I chose 500 pixels for this example. If you are taking really large pictures and want to send them via email, you may want to choose a percentage instead.

7. This is what your basic Scale Image workflow should look like.

8. Here is a before and after of the information pane showing the change in dimensions.

9. Now that you know the Workflow does what you want it to, it’s time to save it. In the File menu you are presented with three options: Save, Save As and Save As Plug-in. The Save and Save As options are pretty much the same thing. Both ask you to name the file, choose a location to save it to and in what format you want to save it. The two format choices are Workflow or Application. The main difference is, a Workflow is like a draft which opens in Automator and can be edited. If you save it as an Application, no changes can be made.

The other choice is the Save As Plug-in option. The reason for saving the Workflow as a Finder Plug-in is when you need to resize images in a folder on my desktop, you can CTRL + Click to get the menu. In this menu highlight Automator and there is your Workflow.

Premade Scripts

For those of you who may not be comfortable with making a Workflow/Application in Automator, there are many sites and forums where people post them for free. Some of the people go as far as writing more advanced scripts and use Automator to run those scripts. A while back Damien posted 20+ Useful Automator Scripts. On these sites, there are many other scripts. If the 20+ in the post don’t do it for you, look around on those sites, there are many many more.

Have you used Automator to make any useful scripts?

Related Posts:

• Automate Repetitive Tasks with Action(s)
• 20+ Useful Automator Scripts for Mac OS X
• Bodega – A Great Alternative to Mac App Store
• 4 Photography Apps For Busy Photographers [Mac]