Lots of people forget about the usefulness of the core utilities (the tools available in Bash). I am even pretty guilty of it at times with such quick and easy things like Perl, Ruby, or Python that allow you to process items from the command line. However, they load up an entire interpreter. It is usually better to use the coreutils.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
Counting Frequencies of Frequencies
16 Aug 2010 — ericMultiple Input Locations From Bash Into Ruby
13 May 2010 — ericI have been trying to figure out how, while using OptionParser to be able to check for files being input on the command line and if they don’t exist, check other input streams (like Bash). This initially wasn’t very easy since input streams are blocking. So with a little help from friends (thanks roberto), I was able to use his method of non-blocking IO and wrap it in a begin/rescue block. I also took a little advice given in this Stack Overflow question called Best Practices with STDIN in Ruby.
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Count Instead of Sequence
26 Mar 2010 — ericI use Bash one liners a lot. I think they are an important part of any programmers and sysadmins toolkit. If you can’t write a bash one liner, even a simple iterator, then you really need to learn. I promise it will make your life infinitely more pleasant.
Frequently I find myself writing things that require a loop or an increment of numbers. A good example would be like something that would walk over my web servers and check their uptime, load averages, etc. Using seq, that’s easy. But since Mac OS X doesn’t come with the seq command, I would previously improvise.
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Git Branch Name in Your Bash Prompt
11 Dec 2009 — ericI work with a few repositories at any given time. And during that time, I typically have multiple branches created for each repository. I figured that it would make my life easier if I knew which branch and/or repository I was working in. Luckily, very little hackery is required here since the git distribution already comes with such a tool. (Note: If you didn’t build Git from source, then you may not have this file.)
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