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Assigning IPA shortcuts for easy access

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Category: Language and Linguistics

Published: 10 March 2016

Being a linguist, you often have to transcribe things in IPA. Out of several languages you work on, there would be times when you work on only one language with a limited inventory of phonemes. In such situations, when you are writing the transcription of a word in a language using IPA, you will often have to write characters like ɘ ɛ ɪ ʃ ʈ ɲ ɳ ŋ ɖ  ̃ ʰ and so on. While there was a time people used fonts, with advent of Unicode and existing font sets including the IPA extensions, it is now easy to use the Unicode which would be visible on any device, without installing any fonts.

How to access a shared folder on network drive

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Category: Generalia

Published: 09 September 2013

Here is how to access a shared folder on a network drive.

Use the following command on a DOS command prompt

C:\>pushd \\networkname\sharedfolder

or

C:\>pushd \\networkIPAddress\sharedfolder

this should take you to a network drive (such as Z:\)

If you want to come back to your local computer drive give the following command

Z:\>popd

Replacing spaces from directories and file names

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Category: Generalia

Published: 06 April 2015

How to replace spaces from directories with an underscore in linux?

A Bash command like the following can do this. On your terminal, you need to be in the directory going down from where you want to change the directories. Please note that the following command does the replacements recursively. SO, even the sub-directories would have its spaces replaced with an underscore:

   find -depth -name "* *" -execdir rename 's/ /_/g' "{}" \;

If you do not want to do it recursively also into sub-directories, you should fire the following command:
   find -name "* *" -type d | rename 's/ /_/g'


How do to the same in the files?

Find the file names in a directory and its subdirectory containing spaces. Replace the space between the stars with any string and it will find the files containing that string.bio
    find -name "* *" -type f

To replace a string in the file name under that directory/sub-directory, use the following command:
    find -name "* *" -type f | rename 's/ /_/g'

Not Enough Space: Grep Error in Windows

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Category: Generalia

Published: 24 June 2015

I was once trying to run a grep command to a directory and looking for a string inside it.
While the directory I was looking into was in a different drive (F:) than that of the system drive (C:) where the grep was installed.

I used the command prompt to first descend into the directory. So, I first went into the directory such that my command prompt looked like as follows:
    F:\MySearchDirectory>

As I was already into this directory, I just shot the gremp command like the following:

    grep -r "mysearchstring"

But this came with an error as follows:

    grep: (standard input): Not enough space

Of course my computer did not have any issues with the space as this was an I7 processor with a huge 16GB of RAM and the hard disk had more than 40% available in all the drives.

This must have to be something else.

I tried to find out but the solutions given were rather too geeky like installing cygwin to do this.

However, I tried to do this using another method. I closed the command prompt and started it again. I did not change my directory in the commmand prompt to F: drive this time. Rather I just shot the following command at its default location:

    grep -r "mysearchstring" F:\MySearchDirectory

And lo, the result was out there in no time.

So, what did it do? I guess wingrep works best when it is in its default location and target anything at other location.

Hope this helps another Windows user.