Remove Control-M Chars in Unix using vi

UNIX treats the end of line differently than other operating systems. Sometimes when editing files in both Windows and UNIX environments, a CTRL-M character is visibly displayed at the end of each line as ^M in vi.

Type :%s/Control+V Control+M//g

and it will looks like: :%s/^M//g

In UNIX, you can escape a control character by preceeding it with a CONTROL-V. The :%s is a basic search and replace command in vi. It tells vi to replace the regular expression between the first and second slashes (^M) with the text between the second and third slashes (nothing in this case). The g at the end directs vi to search and replace globally (all occurrences).

How to get the release of a Linux kernal?

I found its difficult to get the release name and version of a partilcular linux distribution by using the uname command
It can show only 'Linux myhostname and blah blah blah' . But i just wanted to know which distribution and release i'm running. so after a small research i found the command which is very helpful for the purpose.

cat etc/*release

that will display the distribution name and release like :

Red Hat Linux release 7.1 (Seawolf)

Bingo!!!

How to change the color of alternative rows in excel

today i came across a situation like, i wanted to change the background color of alternative raws in an excel sheet.i'd seen it in many web pages.

the trick is

1.select the needed area in your excel sheet
2.go to Format > Conditional Formatting
3.select 'forumla is' from the combo box
4.give the formula =mod(row(),2)=1
5.select the color
6.click ok

Got the trick? it was a new information for me, and its really a cool trick.

Contol Escape in vi editor

Control Escape is a special charecter, which used for many PCL commands, its prerry hard to copy paste these in to a vi editor directly from a html/pdf/text PCL documents.

But you can simulate this charecter in vi editor. for that press

control+v and then escape, ( press the keys in the same order donot release any of the keys till you pressed the escape ). the equivalent ASCII is '\033'.

Reduce the size of a wav file

.wav files are usually big in size, and it comes in to problem when you wanted it to use in some interactive systems, like the voice interaction software or IVRs.

today i found a very handy way to reduce the size of the wave file with out using any third party software. windows has a tool called sound recorder ( Programs>accessories>entertainment>Sound Recorder ) or sndrec32.exe ( type it in Run window )

To reduce the file size or change the attribute of your .WAV file, you can go to file>properties> and click to the convert now button. this will open up a new window

from there you can select the target format, there are a variety of target formats which allows you to convert your WAV files in to 1/10th of the actual size.

Choose your desired format by looking the KBs/second( which is displayed at the right side of each entry).