[Newbies] mucking around in .changes file on linux/ubuntu

[David T. Lewis]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 10:26:13PM -0800, Jerome Peace wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> At some point in making and finding bugs, I am left with having to pick up pieces. On my mac I could always just read the whole changes file into a text editor and extract manually the tail bit.
> 
> Having moved on to Ubuntu 8.04 my tools don't seem to match my needs.
> 
> The Gedit editor refuses to read the text because it is in a format it can't decode. It tries Utf-8 and latin1.
> 
> The Emacs editor will gladly read in the file but because the line endings are cr rather than crlf I get a file all on one line. 
> 
> My emacs skills are rusty so I've not figured out what to do next. 
> 
> Is there anyone out there who has deal with changes files and linux editors? What might work most elegantly or robustly? 
> 
> Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
> 

I use a local one-liner shell script that I call "sqcat":

#!/bin/sh
cat $* | tr '\015' '\012'

And another called "sqless"

#!/bin/sh
sqcat $* | less

These are handy for viewing Smalltalk formatted files from the unix
command line.

If I have a scrambled image and want to edit the end of the changes
with a vi editor, I do this:

$ sqcat squeak.changes | tail -4000 > changes.txt

The puts the last 4000 lines of the changes file into a text file
for editing.

When I am ready to to use the text file in Squeak, I use a file
browser and do the "remove line feeds" menu option before using
the file.

Dave