File sharing | Technology Tales

A collection of legal BitTorrent sites

19^th October 2014

It was an article in a magazine that revealed these legal BitTorrent download sites to me, so I thought that I'd keep them on file for future reference while also sharing them with others who might need them. As far as I am aware, they are all legal in that no copyrighted material is on there. If that changes, I am happy to know and make amendments as needed.

My own interest in torrents arises from their being a convenient way to download installation disk images for Linux distributions, and at least one of the entries is devoted to just that. However, the distribution also lends itself to movies along with music and books, so that is reflected below too. Regarding downloading actual multimedia content, there is so much illegal downloading that a list like this is needed and has blackened the reputation of BitTorrent too because it only ever was conceived as a means for distributing large files in a peer-to-peer manner without the use of a single server. Of course, any use can be found for a technology, and it never has to be legal or morally acceptable either.

Public Domain Torrents

Automating FTP I: UNIX and Linux

11^th April 2008

Having got tired of repeated typing in everything at the prompt of an interactive command line FTP session and doing similar things via the GUI route, I started to wonder if there was a scripting alternative and, lo and behold, I found it after a spot of googling. There are various opportunities for its extension such as prompting for username and password instead of the risky approach of including them in a script or cycling through a directory structure but here's the foundation stone for such tinkering anyway:

HOSTNAME='ftp.server.host' USER='user' PSSWD='password' REP_SRC='source_directory' REP__DEST='destination_directory' FILENAME='*'

rm -rf log_file.tmp

cd "${REP_DEST}"

ftp -i -n -v <<EndFTP >>log_file.tmp 2>>log_file.tmp open ${HOSTNAME} user ${USER} ${PSSWD} prompt cd "${REP_SRC}" mget "${FILENAME}" EndFTP

cd ~

Using SAS FILENAME statement to extract directory file listings into SAS

30^th May 2007

The filename statement's pipe option allows you to direct the output of operating system commands into SAS for further processing. Usefully, the Windows dir command (with its /s switch) and the UNIX and Linux equivalent ls allow you to get a file listing into SAS. For example, here's how you extract the list of files in your UNIX or Linux home directory into SAS:

filename DIRLIST pipe 'ls ~';
data dirlist;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

Using the ftp option on the filename statement allows you to get a list of the files in a directory on a remote server, even one with a different operating system to that used on the client (PC or server), very useful for cases where cross-platform systems are involved. Here's some example code:

filename dirlist ftp ' ' ls user='user' host='host' prompt;
data _null_;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

The PROMPT option will cause SAS to ask you for a password, and the null string is where you would otherwise specify the name of a file.