(For those inclined, digg and reddit links).
Sharing Files in Linux and Understanding Pathnames
Navigating the Linux Filesystem (and the Digg link for those so inclined).
(Digg link, for those who digg).
Navigating the Linux Filesystem (and the Digg link for those so inclined).
I don't know of a way to do that in any shell (the shell would have to capture the output of every command; emacs' shell-mode does that but I don't think any real shells do) but it seemed like it ought to be straightforward enough to do as a regular expression substitute in vi. You're looking for lines where a line beginning with a prompt is followed immediately by another line beginning with a prompt; the goal is to insert a new line consisting only of "[no output]" between the two lines.
It turned out to be pretty easy in vim. Here it is:
:%s/\(^% .*$\n\)\(% \)/\1[no results]\r\2/
Explanation:
Of course, if you have a different prompt, substitute it for "% ". If you have a complicated prompt that includes time of day or something, you'll have to use a slightly more complicated match pattern to match it.
2008-08-26 Jane Hacker <hacker@domain.org> * src/app/print.c: make sure the Portrait and Landscape * buttons update according to the current setting.
I wanted to take each entry, save the name of the developer checking in, then eventually count the number of times each name occurs (the number of times that developer checked in) and print them in order from most check-ins to least.
Getting the names is easy: for check-ins in the last 9 years, I just want the lines that start with "200". (Of course, if I wanted earlier check-ins I could make the match more general.)
grep "^200" ChangeLog
But now I want to trim the line so it includes only the contributor's name. A bit of sed geekery can do that: the date is a fixed format (four characters, a dash, two, dash, two, then two spaces, so "^....-..-.. " matches that pattern.
But I want to remove the email address part too (sometimes people use different email addresses when they check in). So I want a sed pattern that will match something at the front (to discard), something in the middle (keep that part) and something at the end (discard).
Here's how to do that in sed:
grep "^200" ChangeLog | sed 's/^....-..-.. \(.*\)<.*$/\1/'In English, that says: "For each line in the ChangeLog that starts with 200, find a pattern at the beginning consisting of any four characters, a dash, two characters, dash, two characters, dash, and two spaces; then immediately after that, save all characters up to a < symbol; then throw away the < and any characters that follow until the end of the line."
That works pretty well! But it's not quite right: it includes the two spaces after the name as part of the name. In sed, \s matches any space character (like space or tab). So you'd think this should work:
grep "^200" ChangeLog | sed 's/^....-..-.. \(.*\)\s+<.*$/\1/'\s+ means it will require that at least one and maybe more space characters immediately before the < are also discarded. But it doesn't work. It turns out the reason is that the \(.*\) expression is "greedier" than the \s+: so the saved name expression grabs the first space, leaving only the second to the \s+.
The way around that is to make the name expression specify that it can't end with a space. \S is the term for "anything that's not a space character"; so the expression becomes
grep "^200" ChangeLog | sed 's/^....-..-.. \(.*\S\)\s\+<.*$/\1/'(the + turned out to need a backslash before it).
We have the list of names! Add a | sort on the end to
sort them alphabetically -- that will make sure you get all the
"Jane Hacker" lines listed together. But how to count them?
The Unix program most frequently invoked after sort
is uniq, which gets rid of all the repeated lines.
On a hunch, I checked out the man page, man uniq,
and found the -c option: "prefix lines by the number of occurrences".
Perfect! Then just sort them by the number, from largest to
smallest:
grep "^200" ChangeLog | sed 's/^....-..-.. \(.*\S\)\s+<.*$/\1/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnAnd we're done!
Now, this isn't perfect since it doesn't catch "Checking in patch contributed by susan@otherhost.com" attributions -- but those aren't in a standard format in most projects, so they have to be handled by hand.
Disclaimer: Of course, number of check-ins is not a good measure of how important or productive someone is. You can check in a lot of one-line fixes, or you can write an important new module and submit it for someone else to merge in. The point here wasn't to rank developers, but just to get an idea who was checking into the tree and how often.
Well, that ... and an excuse to play with nifty Linux shell pipelines.
Back in July, I solved the last blocker that had been keeping me off bash, so I put some effort into migrating all my .cshrc settings into a .bashrc so I could give bash a fair shot. It almost won; but after four months, I've switched back to tcsh, due mostly to a single niggling bash bug that I just can't seem to solve. After all these years, the crucial difference is still history. Specifically, history amnesia: bash has an annoying habit of forgetting history commands just when I most want them back.
Say I type some longish command. After it runs, I hit return a couple of times, wait a while, do a couple of other things, then decide I want to call that command back from history so I can run something similar, maybe with the filename changed or a different flag. I ctrl-P or up-arrow ... and the command isn't there!
If I type history at this point, I'll see most of my
command history ... with an empty line in place of the line I was
hoping to repeat. The command is gone. My only option is to remember
what I typed, and type it all again.
Nobody seems to know why this happens, and it's sporadic, doesn't happen every time. Friends have been able to reproduce it, so it's not just me or my weird settings. It drives me batty. It wouldn't be so bad except it always seems to happen on the tricky commands that I really didn't want to retype.
It's too bad, because otherwise I had bash nicely whipped into shape, and it does have some advantages over tcsh. Some of the tradeoffs:
!a<TAB>
expands to the last command that started with a. In bash, I have
to type !a:p to see the command, then
!! to execute it.
alias llth 'ls -laFt \!* | head'
In bash these have to be functions, which means they don't show
up typing "which" or "alias".
Of course, you bash users, set me straight if I missed out on some bash options that would have solved some of these problems. And especially if you have a clue about the evil disappearing history commands!
rehash every time you add a program
or change your path. That's a real annoyance of tcsh, and I could
understand a person used to bash rejecting tcsh on this alone.
Of course, bash and tcsh aren't the only shells around. From what I hear, zsh blends the good features of bash and tcsh. One of these days I'll try it and see.
But I always come up against one problem right away: word erase (Control-W). For those who don't use ^W, suppose I type something like:
% ls /backups/images/trips/arizona/2007Then I suddenly realize I want utah in 2007, not arizona. In csh, I can hit ^W twice and it erases the last two words, and I'm ready to type
u<tab>.
In bash, ^W erases the whole path leaving
only "ls", so it's no help here.
It may seem like a small thing, but I use word erase hundreds of
times a day and it's hard to give it up. Google was no help, except
to tell me I wasn't the only one asking.
Then the other day I was chatting about this issue with a friend who uses zsh for that reason (zsh is much more flexible at defining key bindings) and someone asked, "Is that like Meta-Delete?"
It turned out that Alt-Backspace (like many Linux applications, bash calls the Alt key "Meta", and Linux often confuses Delete and Backspace) did exactly what I wanted. Very promising!
But Alt-Backspace is not easy to type, since it's not reachable from the "home" typing position. What I needed, now that I knew bash and readline had the function, was a way to bind it to ^W.
Bash's binding syntax is documented, though the functions available
don't seem to be. But bind -p | grep word gave me
some useful information. It seems that \C-w was bound to
"unix-word-rubout" (that was the one I didn't want) whereas "\e\C-?"
was bound to "backward-kill-word".
("\e\C-?" is an obscure way of saying Meta-DEL: \e is escape, and
apparently bash, like emacs, treats ESC followed by a key as the same
as pressing Alt and the key simultaneously. And Control-question-mark
is the Delete character in ASCII.)
So my task was to bind \C-w to backward-kill-word. It looked like this ought to work:
bind '\C-w:backward-kill-word'
... Except it didn't.
bind -p | grep w
showed that C-W was still bound to "unix-word-rubout".
It turned out that it was the terminal (stty) settings causing the problem: when the terminal's werase (word erase) character is set, readline hardwires that character to do unix-word-rubout and ignores any attempts to change it.
I found the answer in a bash bug report. The stty business was introduced in readline 5.0, but due to complaints, 5.1 was slated to add a way to override the stty settings. And happily, I had 5.2! So what was this new way override method? The posting gave no hint, but eventually I found it.
Put in your .inputrc:
set bind-tty-special-chars Off
And finally my word erase worked properly and I could use bash!
This is Unix, so of course it's possible somehow! The obvious place to start is with the find command, and man find showed how to find all the 1G+ files:
find / -size +1G
(Turns out that's a GNU find syntax, and BSD find, on OS X, doesn't support it. I left it to my friend to check man find for the OS X equivalent of -size _1G.)
But for a problem like this, it's pretty clear we'd need to get find to execute a program that prints both the filename and the size. Initially I used ls -ls, but Saz (who was helping on IRC) pointed out that du on a file also does that, and looks a bit cleaner. With find's unfortunate syntax, that becomes:
find / -size +1G -exec du "{}" \;
But now we needed awk, to collect and add up all the sizes while printing just the filenames. A little googling (since I don't use awk very often) and experimenting led to the final solution:
find / -size +1G -exec du "{}" \; | awk '{print $2; total += $1} END { print "Total is", total}'
Ah, the joys of Unix shell pipelines!
Update: Ed Davies suggested an easier way to do the same thing. turns out du will handle it all by itself: du -hc `find . -size +1G` Thanks, Ed!
Tour of the Hayward Fault http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~shirschf/tour-1.html Technical Reports on Hayward Fault http://quake.usgs.gov/research/geology/docs/lienkaemper_docs06.htm
I wanted to add links around each of the urls, so that I could make it part of a web page, more like this:
Tour of the Hayward Fault
http://www.mcs.csu hayward.edu/~shirschf/tour-1.html
Technical Reports on Hayward Fault
htt p://quake.usgs.gov/research/geology/docs/lienkaemper_docs06.htm
Surely there must be a program to do this, I thought. But I couldn't find one that was part of a standard Linux distribution.
But you can do a fair job of linkifying just using a regular expression in an editor like vim or emacs, or by using sed or perl from the commandline. You just need to specify the input pattern you want to change, then how you want to change it.
Here's a recipe for linkifying with regular expressions.
If you're new to regular expressions, it might be helpful to see a detailed breakdown of why this works:
Sed is a bit trickier: it doesn't understand \S for
non-whitespace, nor = for "zero or one occurrence".
But this expression does the trick:
sed -e 's_\(http\|https\|ftp\)://[^ \t]\+_<a href="&">&</a>_' <infile.txt >outfile.html
Addendum: George Riley tells me about VST for Vim 7, which looks like a nice package to linkify, htmlify, and various other useful things such as creating HTML presentations. I don't have Vim 7 yet, but once I do I'll definitely check out VST.
(Sure, for whole pages you can use the History window, but what if you just want to find an image you saw this morning that isn't there any more?)
Here's a handy trick.
First, change directory to your cache directory (e.g. $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/blahblah/Cache).
Next, list the files of the type you're looking for, in the order in which they were last modified, and save that list to a file. Like this:
% file `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//' > /tmp/foo
In English: ls -t lists in order of modification date, and -1 ensures that the files will be listed one per line. Pass that through grep for the right pattern (do a file * to see what sorts of patterns get spit out), then pass that through sed to get rid of everything but the filename. Save the result to a temporary file.
The temp file now contains the list of cache files of the type you want, ordered with the most recent first. You can now search through them to find what you want. For example, I viewed them with Pho:
pho `cat /tmp/foo`For images, use whatever image viewer you normally use; if you're looking for text, you can use grep or whatever search you lke. Alternately, you could ls -lt `cat foo` to see what was modified when and cut down your search a bit further, or any other additional paring you need.
Of course, you don't have to use the temp file at all. I could have said simply:
pho `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//'`Making the temp file is merely for your convenience if you think you might need to do several types of searches before you find what you're looking for.
I finally realized the answer this morning. These people don't have grep! They don't have any other way of searching out patterns in files.
I use grep dozens of times every day: for quickly looking up a phone number in a text file, for looking in my Sent mailbox for that url I mailed to my mom last week, for checking whether I have any saved email regarding setting up CUPS, for figuring out where in mozilla urlbar clicks are being handled.
Every so often, some Windows or Mac person is opining about how difficult commandlines are and how glad they are not to have to use them, and I ask them something like, "What if you wanted to search back through your mail folders to find the link to the cassini probe images -- e.g. lines that have both http:// and cassini in them?" I always get a blank look, like it would never occur to them that such a search would ever be possible.
Of course, expert users have ways of doing such searches (probably using command-line add-ons such as cygwin); and Mac OS X has the full FreeBSD commandline built in. And more recent Windows versions (Win2k and XP) now include a way to search for content in files (so in the Cassini example, you could search for http:// or cassini, but probably not both at once.) But the vast majority of Windows and Mac users have no way to do such a search, the sort of thing that Linux commandline users do casually dozens of times per day. Until now.
Now I see why desktop search is such a big deal.
But rather than installing web-based advertising-drive apps with a host of potential privacy and security implications ...
wouldn't it be easier just to install grep?
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