Using Vi Mode Everywhere
Not literally everywhere, but more places than usual. I have been looking for this solution for a long time and finally found it. Anyone who has ever worked around me knows that I do basically everything in Vi.
By eric
Tag: bash
Counting Frequencies of Frequencies
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 …
By eric
Multiple Input Locations From Bash Into Ruby
I 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 …
By eric
Count Instead of Sequence
I 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 …
By eric
Git Branch Name in Your Bash Prompt
I 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 …
By eric
Printing New Lines in Bash
Ran across this the other day and decided it required sharing. If you want to print a new line ‘\n‘ in an echo statement in bash, one would think its just as simple as: 12beacon:~ elubow$ echo "This is a test\n" This is a test\n The problem is that this doesn’t interpolate the newline character. …
By eric
Quick Date Calculations With Date
I frequently find myself needing to do quick date calculations in order to make scripts run when I want them to or how I want them to. Usually Date::Calc is just a bit too heavily, especially if it’s something as simple as a BASH script. As it happens, date is quite a powerful tool for …
By eric
Cleaning Up Long Conditionals With Grep
Every so often I am faced with testing a few conditionals before dropping into another control structure. If you have to test out a few conditionals, then its likely a dispatch table won’t be useful. If you have a lot of conditionals to test, you’ll likely not want to deal with an ugly expression like …
By eric
Deleting Lots Of Files (SysAdmin problem solving exercise)
Since I know I am not the first (or the last) to make a typo in logrotate and not catch it for a while…someone else must have been in the position of having to delete a lot of files in the same manner. I recently learned that, as usual, there is more than one way …
By eric
