bash - Muffin Research Labs

Muffin Research Labs

bash

A collection of 12 posts

How do I know if my ubuntu server needs a restart?

A file at /var/run/reboot-required is created that's used at login to tell you a restart is needed in the MOTD. You can check for the presence of this file to know if the updates you just did require a restart To do something with this information

OSX: Toggle hidden files in Finder

Here's a little shell script I knocked up for toggling hidden files in finder. Running from the Finder toolbar To have this to hand from within finder you can create an application in Automater. Just select run shell script and paste the contents of this script. Save it

BASH: Using brace expansion

There's a nice feature of BASH which is to use a comma delimited list of strings inside of curly braces to reduce the amount of typing: here's an example of using brace expansion to create log files for apache: sudo touch {access,error}.log Something seen

Bash: turn on case-insensitive tab completion

I always forget this one, but it's dead handy as it allows you to type "py" hit tab and it will auto complete for "Python" or "python" for example. Without this setting you'd have to type explicitly what you want.

Bash: Resolving Symlinks to Shellscripts

Here's a way to resolve symlinks that call a bash shellscript. The Problem I like to be able to use something like this in my bash scripts:SCRIPTDIR=$(dirname $0) Which is great for a reference to where the script is, but it suffers from the problem that

pwdn: show last n dirs of current directory

I've been playing around with some scripts of late to automate delivery of my various scripts and aliases to servers and in doing so I was looking back at the code I am calling to display the last two directories in my bash prompt [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/

Django: Switching between development branches

Cyril [http://cyril.doussin.name/] and I have been using new forms admin for some stuff we are working on for fun whilst we are here at SXSWi. One of the issues is that if you're developing several different Django sites you won't necessary want to

Using 'select' for multiple choices in shell scripts

I found this neat construct in the gnu bash reference [http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#IDX40]. Select is a great way to be able to present a list of options to a user in a shell script. Take the example given in the reference: select fname

Showing last two directories of pwd in BASH prompt

I'm working on a project where we are using Bazaar downstream of CVS and we have several common Bazaar branches for keeping up to date with CVS. The problem with this is that you can be in the first directory of the branch who's name is

BASH Tip: Alternative to expr for arithmetic

I discovered recently a neat way to do arithmetic in BASH without the need to use the expr command. There's a build-in that uses the syntax $((…)) or $[ … ]. This is also faster as it avoids the need to invoke a separate command. See: http://snap.nlc.dcccd.edu for

BASH: Open FileMerge from CLI

Here's a quick tip. If you want to open FileMerge (Apples graphical diff utility available in developer tools) from the CLI you can use the command opendiff e.g: opendiff file1 file2 This save lots of hassle when you are trying to resolve versioning conflicts, as I always

BASH: Single-quotes inside of single-quoted strings

Using single quotes in BASH ensures that the shell doesn't expand the contents of the quoted string and this is useful most of the time. However if you want to use single quotes within a single quoted string things don't work out as you might expect.