Posts Tagged ‘PDF’

How to password encrypt / decrypt files on Linux to keep and pass your data private

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

how-to-password-protect-encrypt-decrypt-files-linux-tux-logo.png
If you have a sensitive data like a scan copy of your ID card, Driving License, Birth Certificate, Marriage Certificate or some revolutionary business / idea or technology and you want to transfer that over some kind of network lets say Internet vie some public unencrypted e-mail service like (Gmail.com / Yahoo Mail / Mail.com / (Bulgarian Mail Abv.bg)) etc. you will certainly want to transfer the file in encrypted form to prevent, someone sniffing your Network or someone having administrative permissions to servers of free mail where your mail data is stored.

Transferring your files in encrypted form become very important these days especially after recent Edward Snowden disclosures about American Mass Surveilance program PRISM – for those who didn't yet hear of PRISM (this is a American of America's NSA – National Security Agency aiming to sniff and log everyone's information transferred in digital form via the Internet and even Mobile Phone conversations)…

First step to mitigate surveilance is to use fully free software (100% free software) OS distribution like Trisquel GNU / Linux.
Second is to encrypt to use encryption –  the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key.
There are many ways to encrypt your data on Linux and to later decrpyt it, I've earlier blogged about encryping files with GPG and OpenSSL on Linux, however encryption with GPG and OpenSSL is newer as concept than the old-school way to encrypt files on UNIX with crypt command which in Linux is replaced by mcrypt command.

mcrypt is provided by mcrypt package by default on most if not all Linux distributions, however mcrypt is not installed by default so to start using it you have to install it first.

1. Install mcrypt on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint (deb based) Linux

apt-get install –yes mcrypt

 

2. Install mcrypt on Fedora / CentOS rest of RPM bases Linux

yum -y install libmcrypt

 

3. Encrypting file with mcrypt

To get a list with all supported algorithms by mcrypt:
 

mcrypt –list
cast-128 (16): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
gost (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
rijndael-128 (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
twofish (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
arcfour (256): stream
cast-256 (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
loki97 (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
rijndael-192 (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
saferplus (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
wake (32): stream
blowfish-compat (56): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
des (8): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
rijndael-256 (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
serpent (32): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
xtea (16): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
blowfish (56): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
enigma (13): stream
rc2 (128): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb
tripledes (24): cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb

 

 

mcrypt < File-To-Crypt.PDF > File-To-Crypt.PDF.cpy

 

Enter the passphrase (maximum of 512 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Enter passphrase:
Enter passphrase:


If crypt is invoked to create the encrypted file without OS redirects (< >), i.e.:
 

mcrypt -a blowfish File-To-Crypt.PDF

Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Enter passphrase:
Enter passphrase:

File File-To-Crypt was encrypted.

 


mcrypt outputs encrypted file in .nc extension and the new file and file default mode of 0600 (read write only for root user) are set, while new file keeps the modification date of the original.


4. Decrypting file with mcrypt

Decryption of files is done mdecrypt

mdecrypt File-To-Crypt.PDF.cpy
 

Enter passphrase:
File File-To-Crypt.PDF.cpy was decrypted.

To make mcrypt behave in a certain way when invoked modify ~/.mcryptrd

mcrypt is also available as a module for php5 (php5-mcrypt).

How to convert html pages to text in console / terminal on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

HTML to Plain Text Convertion on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

I’m realizing the more I’m converting to a fully functional GUI user, the less I’m doing coding or any interesting stuff…
I remembered of the old glorious times, when I was full time console user and got a memory on a nifty trick I was so used to back in the day.
Back then I was quite often writing shell scripts which were fetching (html) webpages and converting the html content into a plain TEXT (TXT) files

In order to fetch a page back in the days I used lynx(a very simple UNIX text browser, which by the way lacks support for any CSS or Javascipt) in combination with html2text – (an advanced HTML-to-text converter).

Let’s say I wanted to fetch a my personal home page https://www.pc-freak.net/, I did that via the command:

$ lynx -source https://www.pc-freak.net/ | html2text > pcfreak_page.txt

The content from www.pc-freak.net got spit by lynx as an html source and passed html2pdf wchich saves it in plain text file pcfreak_page.txt
The bit more advanced elinks – (lynx-like alternative character mode WWW browser) provides better support for HTML and even some CSS and Javascript so to properly save the content of many pages in plain html file its better to use it instead of lynx, the way to produce .txt using elinks files is identical, e.g.:

$ elinks -source https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/ | html2text > pcfreak_blog_page.txt

By the way back in the days I was used more to links , than the superior elinks , nowdays I have both of the text browsers installed and testing to fetch an html like in the upper example and pipe to html2text produced garbaged output.

Here is the time to tell its not even necessery to have a text browser installed in order to fetch a webpage and convert it to a plain text TXT!. wget file downloading tools supports source dump as well, for all those who did not (yet) tried it and want to test it:

$ wget -qO- https://www.pc-freak.net | html2text Anyways of course, some pages convertion of text inside HTML tags would not properly get saved with neither lynx or elinks cause some texts might be embedded in some elinks or lynx unsupported CSS or JavaScript. In those cases the GUI browser is useful. You can use any browser like Firefox, Epiphany or Opera ‘s File -> Save As (Text Files) embedded functionality, below is a screenshot showing an html page which I’m about to save as a plain Text File in Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox iceWeasel Opera etc. save html webpage as plain text on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD

Besides being handy in conjunction with text browsers, html2text is also handy for converting .html pages already existing on the computer’s hard drive to a plain (.TXT) text format.
One might wonder, why would ever one would like to do that?? Well I personally prefer reading plain text documents instead of htmls 😉
Converting an html files already existing on hard drive with html2text is done with cmd:

$ html2text index.html >index.txt

To convert a whole directory full of .html (documentation) or whatever files to plain text .TXT , cd the directory with HTMLs and issue the one liner bash loop command:

$ cd html/
html$ for i in $(echo *.html); do html2text $i > $(echo $i | sed -e 's#.html#.txt#g'); done

Now lay off your back and enjoy reading the dox like in the good old hacker days when .TXT files were fashionable 😉

How to convert any internet Webpage to PDF from command line on GNU/Linux

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Linux webpage html to pdf command line convertor wkhtmltopdf

If you're looking for a command line utility to generate PDF file out of any webpage located online you are looking for Wkhtmltopdf
The conversion of webpages to PDF by the tool is done using Apple's Webkit open source render.
wkhtmltopdf is something very useful for web developers, as some webpages has a requirement to produce dynamically pdfs from a remote website locations.
wkhtmltopdf is shipped with Debian Squeeze 6 and latest Ubuntu Linux versions and still not entered in Fedora and CentOS repositories.

To use wkhtmltopdf on Debian / Ubuntu distros install it via apt;

linux:~# apt-get install wkhtmltodpf
...

Next to convert a webpage of choice use cmd:

linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
Printing pages (2/2)
Done

If the web page to be snapshotted in long few pages a few pages PDF will be generated by wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf also supports to create the website snapshot with a specified orientation Landscape / Portrait

-O Portrait options to it, like so:

linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf -O Portrait www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf

wkhtmltopdf has many useful options, here are some of them:
 

  • Javascript disabling – Disable support for javascript for a website
  • Grayscale pdf generation – Generates PDf in Grayscale
  • Low quality pdf generation – Useful to shrink the output size of generated pdf size
  • Set PDF page size – (A4, Letter etc.)
  • Add zoom to the generated pdf content
  • Support for password HTTP authentication
  • Support to use the tool over a proxy
  • Generation of Table of Content based on titles (only in static version)
  • Adding of Header and Footers (only in static version)

To generate an A4 page with wkhtmltopdf:

wkhtmltopdf -s A4 www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf

wkhtmltopdf looks promising but seems a bit buggy still, here is what happened when I tried to create a pdf without setting an A4 page formatting:

linux:$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice' ] 71%
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
Printing pages (2/2)
Done
Printing pages (2/2)
Segmentation fault

Debian and Ubuntu version of wkhtmltopdf does not support TOC generation and Adding headers and footers, to support it one has to download and install the static version of wkhtmltopdf
Using the static version of the tool is also the only option for anyone on Fedora or any other RPM based Linux distro.