A couple of useful Ruby scripts

Ruby is my goto language for a lot of small scripting tasks, here's a couple of useful examples. Note that these scripts are good enough implementations and could be made easier to use by adding commandline arguments, I've just never had reason to use them regularly enough for that.

Gutenberg Crawler
Sometimes you need some real files with decent content for testing or whatever. Project Gutenberg is a great source of Public Domain books. Their robot page shows a number of ways to automate download of their files, however a quick and dirty (or effective, depends on your point of view) is to build the path to the text document itself. Exercise restraint - hammering their servers is rude, there are guidelines on the page linked earlier.




SVN Stripper
Git is friendly, it only adds one folder to your project. Subversion is invasive adding one to every single folder. Sometimes clients want source, for whatever reason this script strips out the .svn or _svn folders so you can unversion some subversioned source without folder hunting.