Last month, Daryl Lee gave us a taste of the language Scheme in the article It's time to learn Scheme with a C++ code generator. This time we will be looking at some practical examples written with Scheme Shell (SCSH): finding and replacing text in a bunch of files, sorting files in two different ways, and converting data from a CSV file to an HTML file.

I've got a huge number of digital photos on my computer that need to be organized. What I would like to do is sort the pictures by the date they were taken. The first step to sorting the pictures is to know the date they were taken. As long as the clock is properly set on your camera, your pictures should have the correct date and time of the photo stored in the image's EXIF data.

Diffuse is a graphical tool for comparing and merging text files. It can work with many revision control systems as a diff viewer or merge tool. Diffuse is able to compare an arbitrary number of files side-by-side (n-way merge), and gives the user the ability to manually correct line matching and directly edit the files.

Translating a command line tool to a graphical interface usually means a loss of functionality. However, in the case of the newly released trowser text browser, while I wouldn't swear that the transition has retained all the functionality of the less command that it is intended to replace, I doubt that anyone short of an expert is likely to notice the difference

There are many ways to view files in GNU/Linux. One of the simplest command line tools for viewing files is cat. The cat command, short for concatenate, is actually intended for joining multiple files into one, but it works equally well for viewing text files.

What would life be without music? Given the proper codecs, in Linux you can play almost any digital audio format. Linux has many graphical applications that can do the job, such as Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, and XMMS, all of which provide an intuitive user interface, playlist sorting, and various other options. But what if you want low resource usage so you can play tunes on aging hardware? Here are some alternative players for the Linux command line.

Taking our 720 string permutations, sorting them numerically and weeding out all the duplicates.

Tools like phpMyEdit allow you to create a quick-and-dirty front end to a database, but what if you need to publish a spreadsheet or BibTeX file on your website and give your visitors the ability to dynamically sort, filter, group, and visualize the published data?

One of the things you may find you want to do often from your command line is to view the contents of a text file. This could be to view the contents of some startup script or just one of your own basic configuration files like .bashrc or .bash_aliases. The command is simple to use.