I like writing custom scripts to automate stuff or fix repetitive headaches. Most of them are shell scripts, and a few of them are written in Python. Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few of them. I use Git and GNU stow1 to manage them across different machines, and the workflow2 is quite effective. However, as the list of scripts grows larger, invoking them becomes a pain because the tab completion results get cluttered with other system commands....
I’m one of those people who will sit in front of a computer for hours, fiddling with algorithms or debugging performance issues, yet won’t spend 10 minutes to improve their workflows. While I usually get away with this, every now and then, my inertia slithers back to bite me. The latest episode was me realizing how tedious it is to move config files across multiple devices when I was configuring a new MacBook Air and Mac Mini at the same time....
This morning, while browsing Hacker News, I came across a neat trick1 that allows you to share textual data by leveraging DNS TXT records. It can be useful for sharing a small amount of data in environments that restrict IP but allow DNS queries, or to bypass censorship. To test this out, I opened my domain registrar’s panel and created a new TXT type DNS entry with a base64 encoded message containing the poem A Poison Tree by William Blake....
I was watching this amazing lightning talk1 by Karla Burnett and wanted to understand how traceroute works in Unix. Traceroute is a tool that shows the route of a network packet from your computer to another computer on the internet. It also tells you how long it takes for the packet to reach each stop along the way. It’s useful when you want to know more about how your computer connects to other computers on the internet....
This weekend, I was working on a fun project that required a fixed-time job scheduler to run a curl command at a future timestamp. I was aiming to find the simplest solution that could just get the job done. I’ve also been exploring Google Bard1 recently and wanted to see how it stacks up against other LLM tools like ChatGPT, BingChat, or Anthropic’s Claude in terms of resolving programming queries....
One of my favorite pastimes these days is to set BingChat to creative mode, ask it to teach me a trick about topic X, and then write a short blog post about it to reinforce my understanding. Some of the things it comes up with are absolutely delightful. In the spirit of that, I asked it to teach me a Shell trick that I can use to mimic maps or dictionaries in a shell environment....
I needed to compare two large directories with thousands of similarly named PDF files and find the differing filenames between them. In the first pass, this is what I did: Listed out the content of the first directory and saved it in a file: ls dir1 > dir1.txt Did the same for the second directory: ls dir2 > dir2.txt Compared the difference between the two outputs: diff dir1.txt dir2.txt This returned the name of the differing files likes this:...
Whenever I need to whip up a quick command line tool, my go-to is usually Python. Python’s CLI solutions tend to be more robust than their Shell counterparts. However, dealing with its portability can sometimes be a hassle, especially when all you want is to distribute a simple script. That’s why while toying around with argparse to create a dynamic menu, I decided to ask ChatGPT if there’s a way to achieve the same using native shell scripting....
When writing shell scripts, I’d often resort to using hardcoded ANSI escape codes1 to format text, such as: #!/usr/bin/env bash BOLD="\033[1m" UNBOLD="\033[22m" FG_RED="\033[31m" BG_YELLOW="\033[43m" BG_BLUE="\033[44m" RESET="\033[0m" # Print a message in bold red text on a yellow background. echo -e "${BOLD}${FG_RED}${BG_YELLOW}This is a warning message${RESET}" # Print a message in white text on a blue background. echo -e "${BG_BLUE}This is a debug message${RESET}" This shell snippet above shows how to add text formatting and color to shell script output via ANSI escape codes....
I’ve always had a vague idea about what Unix domain sockets are from my experience working with Docker for the past couple of years. However, lately, I’m spending more time in embedded edge environments and had to explore Unix domain sockets in a bit more detail. This is a rough documentation of what I’ve explored to gain some insights. The dry definition Unix domain sockets (UDS) are similar to TCP sockets in a way that they allow two processes to communicate with each other, but there are some core differences....
The colon : command is a shell utility that represents a truthy value. It can be thought of as an alias for the built-in true command. You can test it by opening a shell script and typing a colon on the command line, like this: : If you then inspect the exit code by typing $? on the command line, you’ll see a 0 there, which is exactly what you’d see if you had used the true command....
My grug1 brain can never remember the correct semantics of quoting commands and variables in a UNIX shell environment. Every time I work with a shell script or run some commands in a Docker compose file, I’ve to look up how to quote things properly to stop my ivory tower from crashing down. So, I thought I’d list out some of the most common rules that I usually look up all the time....
TIL that returning a value from a function in bash doesn’t do what I thought it does. Whenever you call a function that’s returning some value, instead of giving you the value, Bash sets the return value of the callee as the status code of the calling command. Consider this example: #!/usr/bin/bash # script.sh return_42() { return 42 } # Call the function and set the return value to a variable....
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....
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....
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....
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....
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.
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....