littleutils / News: Recent posts

API CHANGE!! The to-bzip utility has been renamed to-bzip2 to better differentiate from the new to-bzip3.

Added to-bzip3. Additionally, the to-7zip, to-lzip, to-lzma, to-xz, and to-zst utilities will now all convert .bz3 files.

The filehash utility now uses unlocked I/O for most algorithms, which can be faster in certain circumstances. It also prints hash results in base64 if the -B option is used and in BSD-style format if the -C option is used.... read more

Upgrade build system from autoconf-2.69 to 2.71.

New littleutil pdfquant, which is used to reduce the size of the colormap used by images embedded in PDF documents. It is targeted at PDF files created by scanning software.

The filesize utility will now totalize the sum of all file sizes if the -t option is used.

The tempname utility will now add 8 random characters to the filename prefix instead of 6.... read more

Major update of scripts to use modern bash(1) techniques. Functionality is unchanged.

Fixed memory reporting in lsysinfo under Cygwin.

Added repeats.pl, which is perl-based utility that functions very similarly to repeats. This was previously called repeats_clone.pl in the source code but was never installed.

Massively cleaned up manpages, with a particular emphasis on better layout in wider terminal windows.

Portability fixes for recent releases of img2pdf and ghostscript.

The pdfidiff utility now uses poppler (via pdftocairo) as the default PDF rendering engine. The -g option may be used to select the previous ghostscript (gs) engine.

The opt-pdf utility now tries both poppler and ghostscript to minimize the size of a PDF file.

The repeats utility now reads 65536 bytes per file in stage 2 instead of only 4096. This greatly reduces the number of files evaluated in stage 3 and saves time for most data sets.

The build intrastructure now supports out-of-tree builds. In celebration of this new feature, littleutils is being promoted to version 1.2.0.

Added -x and -X options to uppercase and lowercase to support extension-only file renames.

Added new littleutil to-zst, to recompress files using Zstd. Additionally, to-lzip, to-lzma, and to-xz have been updated to convert .zst files to their respective target file formats.... read more

Added the new rot-jpg utility, used to losslessly rotate JPEG images from the command line. Added the new lsysinfo utility, which prints out information from the sysinfo(2) and sysconf(3) calls.

[Please note: If you downloaded one of the briefly available littleutils-1.0.44.tar.X files, it contained post-./configure that were specific to the author's system. You should run "make distclean" before running ./configure, or download one of the newer littleutils-1.0.44a.tar.X files that omits those superfluous files.]

Updated rar2tarcat and zip2tarcat to use python3 instead of python2, plus other minor fixes.

Replace -v option in pdfidiff with -q, as run times are long enough that most users will want progress information.

As an error-proofing measure, lreplace will now refuse to process zero-length input or output. The new -z and -Z options can be specified to explicitly permit these, respectively.

Fixed an error in rar2tarcat using bug report and patch from Lazy Kent.

Fix -f option in imagdiff. Added -f option to pdfidiff.

Added checks for header files to improve portability on MacOS, per a bug report by Yves@DMX.

Added -t option to all opt-xxx scripts to preserve timestamps on modified files.

New littleutils imagdiff and pdfidiff, which can be used to create "delta" files showing the differences between two image files or two PDF files, respectively.

Added -r option to opt-png and pngstrip to explicitly set the assumed pixel resolution. Also update pngstrip to preserve pHYs chunk information if the resolution is not explicitly set.

Fixed makefile that resulted in "to-7zip" being created without a script interpreter. Bug identified by Lazy Kent.

Added -4 and -6 options to all "to-" scripts to specify that IPv4 or IPv6 should be preferred for URL downloads, respectively.

Added code to "randomize" and "tempname" to seed the random number generator with bytes from /dev/urandom, if it's available.

Added logic to "opt-pdf" to avoid running Ghostscript on PDF files that have already been processed. Requires that "pdfinfo" from poppler be present on the system.... read more

Cached stat calls in lower/uppercase and pren to improve performance under Cygwin in a networked environment. Additional tweaks to opt-pdf, opt-png, and to-XXX scripts.

For 1.0.36: Added file download capability to the various "to-" file recompression utilities (via wget), so that a file may be downloaded and recompressed with a single command.

For 1.0.35: Added extra checks to ensure proper recompressor behavior regardless of installation environment. Change to lbzip2 for parallel engine inside to-bzip2.

Added options to use multi-threaded compressors inside to-gzip, to-bzip, to-lzip, to-lzma, and to-xz recompression utilities.

BUGFIX! The -b and -c options in wipe-free were being ignored. This has now been fixed.

Added rarfile-handling and timestamp-preserving functionality to all to-* archive conversion scripts, compliments of a patch by Sourgeforge user D. Gloger. This includes the new rar2tarcat utility.

The 1.0.32-2 packages made no provision for utilizing libjpeg-turbo-progs. The new 1.0.32-3 packages do.

The Debian packaging was a little bit goofed up. New 1.0.32-2 packages are available. Special thanks to Sourceforge user pitoziq for reporting the issue.

Added zipfile-handling and timestamp-preserving functionality to all to-* archive conversion scripts, compliments of a patch by Sourgeforge user D. Gloger. This includes the new zip2tarcat utility.

Fixed a portability fix for OS X, based on a patch by Sourgeforge user Zeese Blevens.

Numerous resyncs with upstream, plus a few manpage tweaks. No actual change in functionality.

Added new littleutil opt-pdf, intended to make PDF files smaller and/or more correct. Added lzma conversion capability to to-xz and to-lzip, based on a patch from SourgeForge user Gloger.

Finally added a cmp-based paranoia check to the repeats utility. No other changes.

Replace needless double-quotes with single-quotes throughout shell scripts for improved performance. Minor portability fixes for PNG-associated programs.