Distil git logs attached to a single file

I run git log --oneline to list out the commit logs all the time. It prints out a compact view of the git history. Running the command in this repo gives me this: d9fad76 Publish blog on safer operator.itemgetter, closes #130 0570997 Merge pull request #129 from rednafi/dependabot/... 6967f73 Bump actions/setup-python from 3 to 4 48c8634 Merge pull request #128 from rednafi/dependabot/pip/mypy-0.961 5b7a7b0 Bump mypy from 0.960 to 0.961 However, there are times when I need to list out the commit logs that only represent the changes made to a particular file....

June 21, 2022

Health check a server with 'nohup $(cmd) &'

While working on a project with EdgeDB1 and FastAPI2, I wanted to perform health checks against the FastAPI server in the GitHub CI. This would notify me about the working state of the application. The idea is to: Run the server in the background. Run the commands against the server that’ll denote that the app is in a working state. Perform cleanup. Exit with code 0 if the check is successful, else exit with code 1....

April 18, 2022

Don't add extensions to shell executables

I was browsing through the source code of Tom Christie’s typesystem1 library and discovered that the shell scripts2 of the project don’t have any extensions attached to them. At first, I found it odd, and then it all started to make sense. Executable scripts can be written in any language and the users don’t need to care about that. Also, not gonna lie, it looks cleaner this way. GitHub uses this [pattern]3 successfully to normalize their scripts....

November 23, 2021

Use 'command -v' over 'which' to find a program's executable

One thing that came to me as news is that the command which—which is the de-facto tool to find the path of an executable—is not POSIX compliant. The recent Debian debacle1 around which brought it to my attention. The POSIX-compliant way of finding an executable program is command -v, which is usually built into most of the shells. So, instead of doing this: which python3.12 Do this: command -v which python3....

November 16, 2021

Write git commit messages properly

Writing consistent commit messages helps you to weave a coherent story with your git history. Recently, I’ve started paying attention to my commit messages. Before this, my commit messages in this repository used to look like this: git log --oneline -5 d058a23 (HEAD -> master) bash strict mode a62e59b Updating functool partials til. 532b21a Added functool partials til ec9191c added unfinished indexing script 18e41c8 Bash tils With all the misuse of letter casings and punctuations, clearly, the message formatting is all over the place....

November 11, 2021

Use curly braces while pasting shell commands

Pasting shell commands can be a pain when they include hidden return \n characters. In such a case, your shell will try to execute the command immediately. To prevent that, use curly braces { <cmd> } while pasting the command. Your command should look like the following: { dig +short google.com } Here, the spaces after the braces are significant.

November 8, 2021

Use strict mode while running bash scripts

Use unofficial bash strict mode while writing scripts. Bash has a few gotchas and this helps you to avoid that. For example: #!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail echo "Hello" Where, -e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status. -u Treat unset variables as an error when substituting. -o pipefail The return value of a pipeline is the status of the last command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if no command exited with a non-zero status....

November 8, 2021