I got sick of having to try to copy and make major modifications for each environment that I was in. As a consultant I sometimes have to deal with ridiculous policy driven constraints as to what software I can or cannot use. Sometimes it’s simply ignorance (like when the CTO of a company said that I could only script in a “…standard shell like BASH…” nothing obscure like KSH) but what ever the case it’s a pain when you’ve grown accustom to something as personal as your shell settings. Now I have a solution.
Nov
17
2009
17
2009
Nov
7
2009
7
2009
Shell tricks: eval helps make dynamic scripting rock.
If you write shell scripts of any significant size, eval is a very good command to understand (well). It can make some code simpler, other code obsolete, and yet other code it makes possible that would not be otherwise.
What is eval?
According to the 2004 IEEE Std. 1003.1:
eval constructs commands by concatenating arguments.
The example given on [...]
Oct
24
2009
24
2009
why I don’t write BASH scripts
I’m constantly hounded by GNU/Linux newbies GNUbies about many things relative to scripting; Why don’t I use gawk for my awk scripts; Why don’t I use ‘[[’ instead of ‘[’ for my condition tests in shell scripts; Why don’t I use BASH for my shell scripts?. Such questions rarely come from seasoned UNIX professionals who have worked on multiple flavors of Unix. Explaining the way things work in the real world requires that the audience has an attention span beyond that of the averageI’m_pissed_at_society_and_microsoft_sucks-linux-neophyte.
Jul
12
2009
12
2009
CAWKLib
CAWK (Cawk’s Another Web Kit) is a web framework written in AWK that is soon to be under development. When we started working on it we discovered that we needed a better way to manage file inclusions than the ‘-f’ command line option. We decided to write our own pre-processor and package it with the custom libraries that we were developing.
Jun
27
2009
27
2009
LUA_PATH on OSX
Earlier today I was playing around with Lua and luarocks on my laptop (which happens to be a MacBook Pro). I thought maybe I’d try re-writing telechat in Lua with the LuaSocket package. After I’d installed Lua 5.1.4 via mac ports along with luarocks:
$ sudo port -v install lua luarocks
I installed LuaSocket.
$ sudo luarocks install [...]
Jun
27
2009
27
2009
Adventures in Lua (I)
After studying and working with Lua for about a year now, I find it to be a very powerful and innovative language. While the syntax is not my favorite, overall it’s fun to work with. Recently I started using the standalone lua interpreter for some general purpose scripting which has revealed to me a few key reasons that Lua (the language) or at least lua (the interpreter) won’t be readily employed for system scripting on a large scale anytime soon.
Jun
19
2009
19
2009
An AWKing we will go
I’ve been meaning to setup awkscripting.com for a while. Well it’s finally up. There’s not much there yet but as I collect resources on awk and continue to write scripts for which most people will call me crazy, it should hopefully grow.
Jun
17
2009
17
2009
Why I’m not doing Plone anymore (for now)…I think
I’ve been a fan of Plone for 8 years. I’ve developed apps based on it and done much consulting related to it. I’ve contributed monetarily to the project and various members of it’s community and as of right now I have no desire to work with it.