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Spinner is a small program that displays a little "spinning" ASCII character in the top left corner of your terminal. To make this effect it cycles through punctuation marks like this " - \ | / - \ | / ... " (try it to see). By default the character is drawn in inverse video (or your terminal's equivalent). But you can turn this off with the -i switch. It supports any terminal capable of handling VT100 style escape codes. Spinner is useful for keeping telnet and ssh links from dropping due to inactivity. Many firewalls, and some ISPs drop connections when they are perceived as idle. By having spinner running the server is constantly sending a tiny amount of data over the link, preserving the connection. Thus (for search engines) Spinner is an anti-dle, timeout preventing, background daemon process for Unix variants including Linux. - Michael L. Hostbaek mich@FreeBSD.org

usermatic is a collection of Perl scripts to automate maintenance of the user database on Linux and FreeBSD. Originally it was developed for FreeBSD, but it should work on Linux as well. These scripts compare the passwd database to the current list of employees/students/etc. which has to be supplied in a suitable format. This package was designed to work together with userneu.pl (sysutils/userneu/) and contains no facilities to do the actual account creation work, instead it outputs a list suitable for processing with userneu. Stale accounts can be deleted using the reaper.pl script. These scripts are experimental but they should work ok. Please report bugs to me if you find them. -Andreas Fehlner fehlner@gmx.de

Docbook2odf is a toolkit that automatically converts DocBook to OASIS OpenDocument (ODF, the ISO standardized format used for texts, spreadsheets and presentations). Conversion is based on a XSLT which makes it easy to convert DocBook->ODF, ODT, ODS and ODP as all these documents are XML based. Also goal of docbook2odf is to generate well formatted documents in OpenDocument, ready to be used in instant, with actually considering current rules of the Corporate Identity of organizations. Final results should not be restricted to text like documents but also many other forms could be generated, like presentations, charts or forms with images and multimedia. The result is provided in a one zipped ODF file (.odt/.odp/.ods) with all required content. There are group of utilities like docbook2odt, docbook2ods and docbook2odp as docbook2odf is actually universally converting to these respective formats.

Contains renderers and parsers for both XML and HTML 5 document fragments, which share data structures so that it's easy to work with both. Document fragments are bits of documents, which are not constrained by some of the high-level structure rules (in particular, they may contain more than one root element). Note that this is not a compliant HTML 5 parser. Rather, it is a parser for HTML 5 compliant documents. It does not implement the HTML 5 parsing algorithm, and should generally be expected to perform correctly only on documents that you trust to conform to HTML 5. This is not a suitable library for implementing web crawlers or other software that will be exposed to documents from outside sources. The result is also not the HTML 5 node structure, but rather something closer to the physical structure. For example, omitted start tags are not inserted (and so, their corresponding end tags must also be omitted).

MultiMarkdown, or MMD, is a tool to help turn minimally marked-up plain text into well formatted documents, including HTML, PDF (by way of LaTeX), OPML, or OpenDocument (specifically, Flat OpenDocument or '.fodt', which can in turn be converted into RTF, Microsoft Word, or virtually any other word-processing format). MMD is a superset of the Markdown syntax, originally created by John Gruber. It adds multiple syntax features (tables, footnotes, and citations, to name a few), in addition to the various output formats listed above (Markdown only creates HTML). Additionally, it builds in 'smart' typography for various languages (proper left- and right-sided quotes, for example). NOTE: To use the mmd2pdf script, you must install print/latexmk.

PXP is a validating XML parser for OCaml. It strictly complies to the XML-1.0 standard. The parser is simple to call, usually only one statement (function call) is sufficient to parse an XML document and to represent it as object tree. Once the document is parsed, it can be accessed using a class interface. The interface allows arbitrary access including transformations. One of the features of the document representation is its polymorphic nature; it is simple to add custom methods to the document classes. Furthermore, the parser can be configured such that different XML elements are represented by objects created from different classes. This is a very powerful feature, because it simplifies the structure of programs processing XML documents.

odt2txt is a command-line tool which extracts the text out of OpenDocument Texts produced by LibreOffice, OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice and others. odt2txt can also extract text from some file formats similar to OpenDocument Text, such as OpenOffice.org XML, which was used by OpenOffice.org version 1.x and older StarOffice versions. To a lesser extent, odt2txt may be useful to extract content from OpenDocument spreadsheets and OpenDocument presentations. odt2txt is: - small - supports multiple output encodings - adopts to your locale - able to substitute common characters which the output charset does not contain with ascii look-a-likes - written in C, has few dependencies - portable (runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, *BSD, Cygwin, Solaris, HP-UX)

Surely the CPAN doesn't need yet another CSV parsing module. Text::CSV_XS is the standard parser for CSV files. It is fast as hell, but unfortunately it can be a bit verbose to use. A number of other modules have attempted to put usability wrappers around this venerable module, but they have all focussed on parsing the entire file into memory at once. This method is fine unless your CSV files start to get large. Once that happens, the only existing option is to fall back on the relatively slow and heavyweight XML::SAXDriver::CSV module. Parse::CSV fills this functionality gap. It provides a flexible and light-weight streaming parser for large, extremely large, or arbitrarily large CSV files.

The Petal::Utils package contains commonly used Petal modifiers (or plugins), and bundles them with an easy-to-use installation interface. By default, a set of modifiers are installed into Petal when you use this module. You can change which modifiers are installed by naming them after the use statement: # use the default set: use Petal::Utils qw( :default ); # use the date set of modifiers: use Petal::Utils qw( :date ); # use only named modifiers, plus the debug set: use Petal::Utils qw( UpperCase Date :debug ); # don't install any modifiers use Petal::Utils qw(); You'll find a list of plugin sets throughout this document. You can also get a complete list by looking at the variable: %Petal::Utils::PLUGIN_SET; For details on how the plugins are installed, see the "Advanced Petal" section of the Petal documentation.

This module provides encoding to LaTeX escapes from utf8 using mapping tables in Pod::LaTeX and HTML::Entities. This covers only a subset of the Unicode character table (undef warnings will occur for non-mapped chars). Mileage will vary when decoding (converting TeX to utf8), as TeX is in essence a programming language, and this module does not implement TeX. I use this module to encode author names in BibTeX and to do a rough job at presenting LaTeX abstracts in HTML. Using decode rather than seeing $\sqrt{\Omega^2\zeta_n}$ you get something that looks like the formula. The next logical step for this module is to integrate some level of TeX grammar to improve the decoding, in particular to handle fractions and font changes (which should probably be dropped).