Bonus: U is for used up

I knew the U section would be short, but I didn’t realize two-thirds of the titles I had in The List were either lost, unusable or broken. That means the bulk of the entries are here, on this page, and a fraction is available as real-life posts. Pity.

In any case, there are quite a few left. Please feel free to pick through and see what you can glean from this. The regular rules apply.

• uberwriter: I had great hopes for uberwriter, but also had great doubts based on the screenshot. The homepage suggests it is a simple text editor with support for markdown specifically; the version I found in AUR generated only errors, and the version offered through bzr failed to build. I suspect it relied on a graphical environment though.
• ufw: Universal firewall? Uncomplicated firewall? I forget what it stands for. Regardless, it’s a firewall, and I got burned messing with those.
• ul: I had ul on my list, but it is apparently only a tool for underlining text on terminals that support it (or maybe they don’t support it, I am not sure ). I’ve never seen it in use, and as it is a two-letter command, it’s a little difficult to track down help on the Internet. I was willing to let this one go free.
• umask: Displays the current umask environment. About as exciting as a mashed potato sandwich.
• uml: I could only find references to uml as shorthand for user-mode Linux, which doesn’t really make sense in the context of text-only applications. In other words, I have no clue why this was on my list.
• unicornscan: Home page is gone. Not available in AUR. Not available in Debian. Found it, I had the wrong link. 😳
• unoconv: A document converter that supposedly piggybacks on the OpenOffice/LibreOffice suite. I tried to build it and it immediately attempted to download the entire LibreOffice corpus. Perhaps somedays someone can explain to me the value in having a tiny text-based document converter if it needs a gargantuan office suite, plus the graphical underpinnings, plus the hardware requirements to run it all.
• unset: Shell command, I believe.
• uptime: uptime really only shows the system uptime in one of three ways, so I omitted it because I didn’t think there was enough meat to make a post. If you’re wondering, there’s the default uptime, the “pretty” uptime with -p, and the “since” uptime with -s … all at your command.
• uraniacast: I had high hopes for uraniacast as a podcast downloader (that segment of the Linux text-only landscape is a little weak, in my uneducated opinion), but it ran into problems in the Arch version with unbuildable dependencies. There are instructions on the home page for building this in Debian, but I didn’t try it. For me, one of the best things about using Debian is never having to build anything. …
• urlsniff: Another tool out of the dsniff suite. No offense, but we’ve been through dsniff and its cohort.
• urpmi: Unless I am mistaken, this is just a (the?) package manager for Mandriva/Mageia.
• uruk: My notes suggest uruk is a wrapper for iptables, and again, I’m not entertaining firewall tools today.
• users: Shows users logged in to the machine, according to /var/run/utmp. So exciting, I might cry.
• util-shell: I feel a tiny bit guilty about leaving out Taylor Chu’s util-shell package, because it does appear to have some nifty shortcuts if you need some stronger or condensed ways to manipulate shell commands and scripts. Taylor, whom you might remember from eons ago when we looked at 2a, has a long list of nifty math, string and list gimmicks packed into util-shell. Everything is based on go, so I believe you’ll probably need that to use them, if not just to build them. In the end though, I decided it was specific to shells, and not really an application. When I start that mystical two-a-day shell review blog, it will be on my list of nifty gimmicks. Is that fair?

Oddly, the V section looks just as short — if not shorter. In fact, between now and the end of the alphabet, W is the only section with some real bulk to it — and that’s only about 40 titles, some of which I will discard off the bat. We are nearing the end days, friends. …