Kevin Ernst ernstki

elementary OS's Contractor service uses standard Linux .desktop files (spec) with a .contract extension to provide context (secondary-click) menu entries for specific MIME types. System-wide apps put these in /usr/share/contractor, whatever the Flatpak version of that is, and you can create your own in ~/.local/share/contractor. Below are some examples.

Contractor actions for all MIME types

If you want a specific Contractor action to apply to all filetypes, including device special files, directories, whatever, you can exploit the ! (exclusion) operator in the MimeType key, like this:

MimeType=!nothing;

Multi-line text replacement with sed

Original question: "Catch an entire function with grep" on Stack Overflow

It is possible to use (GNU) grep to do multiline matching[^fn1], but you're probably making more work for yourself that way, because sed can do basically everything grep can plus make replacements.

Using grep -zoP to do multiline matching is fundamentally the same trick as what's proposed below: turning your file into one long string, separated by

	import sys
	import socket
	import logging

	logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

	port = None
	startport = 8000
	MAXTRIES = 10

	#!/usr/bin/env python3
	##
	## flatcrap - lists orphaned Flatpak data in ~/.var/app
	##
	## Author: Kevin Ernst <ernstki -at- mail.uc.edu>
	## Date: 16 October 2025
	## License: MPL 2.0
	## Homepage: https://gist.github.com/ernstki/f3e279e8a050c2df94e9fcfd69d67c2f
	##
	## Originally based on `main.py` from Flatsweep by giantpinkrobots[1], but

	#!/usr/bin/env python3
	##
	## Convert LDAP’s “number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601
	## (UTC)” timestamps to human-readable dates, in the local timezone. See
	## reference [1] for more details.
	##
	## Does not use f-strings, so should work in any old Python 3.
	##
	## Author: Kevin Ernst <ernstki -at- mail.uc.edu>
	## Date: 13 Oct 2025

	#!/usr/bin/bash
	HASHALG=sha256
	files=()
	args=(-$HASHALG)

	while (( $# )); do
	case $1 in
	-*)
	for arg in "${args[@]}"; do
	if [[ $1 == $arg ]]; then

	#!/usr/bin/env perl
	##
	## Print where a Perl 5 library was included from
	##
	## Author: Symkat
	## Source: http://www.symkat.com/find-a-perl-modules-path
	## License: Distributed under the same terms as Perl itself
	## <https://perldoc.perl.org/perlartistic>
	##
	use warnings;

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	##
	## Fetch macOS manual pages from the apple-oss-distributions GitHub org
	##
	## Author: Kevin Ernst <ernstki -at- mail.uc.edu>
	## Date: 8 May 2025
	## Source: https://gist.github.com/ernstki/ea2649e5ec34dacd9b1d13a8eae10a54
	## License: WTFPL
	##
	## To do: caching

	TITLE = Lyrion.org documentation tasks
	SHELL = bash
	PYTHON = python3
	VIRTUALENV = venv
	REQUIREMENTS = mkdocs-requirements.txt
	OUTPUTDIR = site
	BINDADDR = 127.0.0.1
	PORT = 8888

	help: # prints this help

	##
	## Test multiple versions of delta[1] against multiple versions of bat[2]
	## and stop when there's a failure
	##
	## Tested with GNU Make 4.x on Linux; YMMV with macOS or BSD
	##
	## Author: Kevin Ernst <ernstki -at- mail.uc.edu>
	## Source: https://gist.github.com/ernstki/7dbb17c42911708660dc3c4eee3c1002
	## License: released to the public domain
	##