shell - Muffin Research Labs

Muffin Research Labs

shell

A collection of 12 posts

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.

Checking tarball contents before extraction

When you are about to unpack a tarball you didn't create it's a good idea to run the -t flag instead of just assuming it's been packed in a sensible way. tar -tzf foo.tar.gz This lists all of the files in the

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

Linux: Changing UIDs and GIDs for a user

Just had to do a quick switch over of UID [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier_(Unix)] and GIDs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_identifier_(Unix)] for a couple of users. I'm using Puppet [http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet] to manage server configurations and it'

Mac OSX tip: ls command color output

If you have OSX tiger simply grab the fileutils from fink with fink install fileutils Then add the following to your .profile: export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto' eval "`/sw/bin/dircolors`" alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS' alias ll='ls $LS_OPTIONS -lah'

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

From the command line to your clipboard and vice versa

Found a neat trick the other day via github.com [http://github.com], in their instructions for copying public keys. pbcopy (pasteboard copy) on mac OSX is a command that puts it's input into the clipboard so you can paste the output anywhere. In this example the output

Extracting a single file from a tar backup

Like an idiot I accidentally overwrote a file for this blog when uploading some other stuff; accidents happen. Anyway, I have backups (you do have backups right?) and I needed to grab a single file out of the latest tar. Fortunately this is really straight forward and rather than unpacking

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: 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.

Web Development

Six useful shell commands for web developers

The aim of this article is to give a basic introduction into six shell commands that would be useful to any web developer that regularly works on linux or unix boxes. All of these commands are easy to use and if you aren't familiar with any of these