Bash

There are some nice shortcuts to typing everything all the time. These are called event designators, word designators and modifiers. There is plenty of info on these in the bash man pages, but some real world examples follow:

Download, expand and change directory:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68719/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01.tar.gz
tar xvf !$:t
cd !$:r:r

Repackaging:

cat myfile-1.0.1.tar.gz | gunzip | bzip2 | !#:1:s/gz/bz2

Forgot to sudo, rerun the previous event with sudo using !!:

nano /etc/hosts
sudo !!

Copying

Copy files merging and preserving permissions:

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

Find

Find is a very powerful command and can save a lot of time. Here are a few of my favourite uses:

Finding in files

I have the following script in ~/bin/find_all to find all files excluding some common metadata and generated locations:

#!/bin/bash
# has support for null separator due to usage of spaces in paths
if [ "-0" = "$1" ]; then
	print="-print0"
else
	print="-print"
fi
prune="( -name target -o -name .svn -o -name .git ) -prune"
match="-type f"
find . $prune -o $match $print

This can then be used to search through the files using grep, e.g.:

find_all | xargs grep TODO

Search and Replace

Find that execs sed on each matched file:

find . -type f -exec sed -i '' 's/FROM/TO/g' {} \;

xmlstarlet

Reformatting xml files

Also known as pretty printing, this makes use of xmlstarlet and I have this script in ~/bin/xmlpp:

#!/bin/bash
files=`find . -type d -name target -prune -o -name *.xml -print`
for file in $files
do
   mv $file $file.bak
   xml fo $file.bak > $file
   rm $file.bak
done

XML Queries

Query xml for particular elements:

curl http://feeds.feedburner.com/railscasts -o rss.xml
xml sel -t -m "/rss/channel/item" -v "title" -n rss.xml > episode-list.txt
xml sel -t -m "/rss/channel/item" -v "enclosure/@url" -n rss.xml > episode-media-urls.txt