Fabio Strozzi

Safebackup 1.5

Safebackup is a shell script for making safe, reliable backups of your data. I use it periodically to save the content of my Linux partitions on DVD. The goal is to provide a certain safety against data corruption. Common backup scripts create a gzip-compressed tar archive but this turns out to be unreliable against data corruption or data loss. There's no way to recover a corrupted gzip archive. Instead, Safebackup makes use of these tools:

• afio: each file added to the archive is first compressed with either bzip2 or gzip; in this way, a corrupted archive can still be splitted in compressed files.
• par2 (app-arch/par2cmdline in Gentoo portage): creates parity files and it's useful to recover damaged data (according to a chosen protection level).
• md5sum: creates checksums of the archives and detect data corruption or loss.

Safebackup 1.5 

LaTex Makefile 2.1

A set of 2 scripts and a Makefile for solving the dependencies among LaTex files. I use them every time I write a LaTex document. Why is it useful? Suppose you have a main LaTex file that includes many others; you wish that make recompiled everything if one of these files changed. Another example: your LaTex sources include images and you wish that make recognised that the images have changed and recompiled the document. This reasoning also applies to BibTex bibliography files.

Features:

• Builds DVI, PS and PDF documents (and more formats could be easily supported)
• Recognizes bibliography changes, included tex file changes, image changes
• Supports PGF commands to include pictures (pgfdeclareimage and pgfuseimage)
• Automatically extracts EPS BoundingBox when images different from EPS are included (PNG, JPEG, FIG, SVG and PDF are supported)

Should work on any kind of Unix OS (tested on Linux only). Depends on:

• Zsh (Bash has not associative arrays!)
• make
• Awk (maybe gawk is better)
• pdftops
• ImageMagick

Feel free to write me if you need help.

LaTex Makefile 2.1