So today I learned about find -exec ... +

I was working on a shell script that needed to look at some lines in a bunch of files and perform some data mining. I started it in bash, so I am writing it in bash even though dave0 notes that I should have started in in perl. Point taken… I suffer for my mistake.

After a quick google I learned that a nice way to do what the topic of this post describes can be done using

    IFS='
    '
    declare -a foo=( $(cat $file) )

Which is great! Right?

I wrote a short script to shrink URLs:

    % shorturl http://www.jukie.net/~bart/shorturl
    http://2tu.us/ce8

    % shorturl
    Type in some urls and I'll try to shrink them for you...
    http://www.jukie.net/~bart/shorturl
    http://2tu.us/ce8
    http://www.jukie.net/~bart/20090320214228
    http://2tu.us/ce9

I am doing this as part of my new identi.ca addiction^W usage and extending GregKH’s command line micro blogging tool.

UPDATE: also picked up by @vando for use with mcabber.

I have recently added a few things to by wmii+ruby configuration that I wanted to share. These are:

• start a program in a given view from bash prompt (authored by Dave O’Neill)
• start a program in a given view using Alt-Shift-p (authored by Jean Richard)
• start an xterm in a given view using Alt-Shift-Return
• cache directory changes in a view, start an xterm in the view’s last directory using Alt-Apostrophe

I saw this blog post by Debian’s Florian Ragwitz, and ran my own list of most commonly used shell commands. Here they are…

    history |awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | head -15
        627 git
        266 vim
         98 cd
         76 grep
         69 ls
         63 gitk
         60 ssh
         51 sudo
         47 vv
         47 apt-cache
         40 cat
         34 make
         33 patch
         30 rm
         25 man

I wanted to have vim colouring of source files in html format. There is Text::VimColor perl module, but it’s not in Debian.

Vim has a :TOhtml command (see :h syntax). I wrote a tohtml shell script to solve the problem using :TOhtml. And yes, the html was generated with itself.

bash comand line

For a few years now I've been using vi editing mode for bash and anything that uses readline. Here is how I've set things up.

In .bashrc I use the following to enable vi editing mode:

        set -o vi

This allows me to type as usual and use ESC to get into vi command mode. Since ESC is so far away I frequently use control-[... unless I feel I need the exercise.