For several months now I've been talking about crap without ever explaining what any of it is. Well, here's what some of it is.
All sysadmins and programmers do some toolsmithing from time to time, and "mfutils" is my effort to take the best of my little tools, polish 'em up real nice, and release them as generally useful things. For the record, the 'm' in "mfutils" and all the individual programs doesn't stand for "mdxi", it's from "mfn", which is (for better or worse) the flagship of the bunch.
Here then, is the second test (and first public) release of mfutils. I know the installer script is complete crap (and the internals of mfarrg are pretty ugly too), but it's been too long since I released any software. Both utils in this test release have --help and full manpages, but here's a brief description to help you decide if this is something you wanna play with or not.
mfn stands for "Moronic Filename Normalizer". It was originally written to take the suck out of the names of, say, media files that one might collect from various places, but it's kinda useful for keeping filenames predictable in a more general way too. It's definitely not new -- the VC log's first entry is stamped 2003-02-11 23:53:14 and there had already been several iterations before it was put in VC -- and it's been used extensively by myself and the people I hang out with.
mfarrg is a semi-cleaned-up, overhauled, extended, mfutil-ified version of a tiny little hack I started writing at least a year ago to fill a gap in Apache log analysis: an all-ways referrer report tool (the name stands for Apache Referrer Report Generator). It only works on Combined format logs, and its easier to show you what it does than tell you about it.
Both are highly flexible, more feature-packed than you might expect from what tools to do such banal tasks, and can even write their own configuration files thanks to some Getopt::Long and YAML synergy. More info is in the tarball. If you try it, please let me know what you think (constructive criticism welcome!)
P.S. One more tool is planned for the full R1 release of this package: mffix. More on it later.
