Command Line Project Manager (clpm) v1.0.1 released

clpm is designed to make managing sets of files easier at the Unix command line. It's free and open source. Please view the demo here. Find more info at http://tinypig.com/clpm

Call for help with open source project "CLPM"

CLPM is my “Command Line Project Manager”. It’s a tool I wrote and have been using myself for several years now, and I am releasing it in the hope that others might find it useful.

Also, if you have been looking for an open source project to contribute to, here’s your chance! I don’t care what your level of experience is, if you think you have a useful comment or contribution, I’d like to hear from you!

There is a Todo section in the README, but I want to add a couple notes here:

1. It’s currently not packaged, nor does it have an installer. This probably makes it much less likely to be adopted.
2. I’m not sure how to promote it to make sure its audience (developers/sysadmins maybe) at least get a chance to see it, even if it ends up that it’s useful to nobody but me.

The project page has more details: https://github.com/tinypigdotcom/clpm

Using Files for Inter-process Communication

I was abusing a test suite I had written to add test data to the database and I was running it inside an infinite loop because it was going to take a while to generate the 10,000 records I wanted. When it came time to stop, I had difficulty either control-c-ing or killing the right processes to get it to quit, so the second time I ran it, I did this instead:

while true
do
    if [ -f $HOME/stop_while ]; then
        break
    fi
    ./thing_i_wanted_repeated
done

Using files for inter-process communication seems so much more straightforward to me.

My First Crontab

Ok, it's not the first crontab I've ever written. This is my crontab template that I just created for mysellf because even though I've been using cron since the late 80s, I still keep forgetting which side is minutes. How sad is that?!?

I copied the nice format from Wikipedia's cron page.

The first line (the only line that isn't a comment, and therefore an actual crontab entry) is my initial test to make sure cron is working for the account.

   * * * * *  echo hi >/tmp/a.hi
#  * * * * *  command to execute
#  _ _ _ _ _
#  | | | | |
#  | | | | |
#  | | | | +---day of week (0 - 6)
#  | | | +--------month (1 - 12)
#  | | +-------------day of month (1 - 31)
#  | +------------------hour (0 - 23)
#  +-------------------------min (0 - 59)

Convert Unix man page to PDF

Thanks to this post by Aron at True EDGE, I learned how to convert a Unix man page to a PDF file:

man -t bash | ps2pdf - bash.pdf

Combined with my iPad, and the GoodReader app (in which I can sync a subdirectory from my Dropbox), and I can save man pages for reading later in a more comfortable setting.

Changing the Lock Screen Wallpaper in Lubuntu

I noticed that after changing my desktop wallpaper in Lubuntu 13.10 "saucy" (right click on the desktop and choose Desktop Preferences, Appearance tab), that the image on my lock screen had not changed. I don't love that wallpaper, so I wanted to change it. After searching the web and not finding a way to do so, I tried a few things and finally ran a locate for "wallpaper" finding, among other things, these files:

dave@tyrant:~$ locate wallpaper
(output has been truncated to display only relevant files)
/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers
/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers/1310-A_Winter_Magic_by_Luciash_D-Being.jpg
/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers/1310-Moody_by_Robert_Wicek.jpg
/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers/1310-Muelle_by_Manuel_Puentes.jpg

Listing the contents of that directory gave me a little more insight:

dave@tyrant:~$ cd /usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers
dave@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers$ ls -l
total 5260
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  890508 Sep 19 11:57 1310-A_Winter_Magic_by_Luciash_D-Be
ing.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  585583 Sep 19 14:41 1310-lubuntu-default-wallpaper.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  370825 Sep 19 11:57 1310-Moody_by_Robert_Wicek.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  461580 Sep 19 11:57 1310-Muelle_by_Manuel_Puentes.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  835281 Sep 19 11:57 1310-Smolikas_by_George_Blades_Voul
garakis.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2175372 Sep 19 11:57 1310-Two_Jack_Lake_by_C_Ayers.jpg
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      29 Feb 11 12:49 lubuntu-default-wallpaper.jpg ->
lubuntu-default-wallpaper.png
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      12 Feb 22 10:54 lubuntu-default-wallpaper.png ->
./1310-lubuntu-default-wallpaper.png

So, I copied the picture I wanted as my wallpaper into this directory and re-established what seemed to be the operative link:

dave@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers$ sudo su - # be careful after this as
we are now root
root@tyrant:~# cd /usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers
root@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers# cp /home/dave/unnecessarily_long_web
_name.jpg ./nifty_colors.jpg
root@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers# ln -fs ./nifty_colors.jpg ./lubuntu-
default-wallpaper.png
root@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers# exit
logout
dave@tyrant:/usr/share/lubuntu/wallpapers$

And it worked! Using this method I have a different wallpaper on my desktop than on my lock screen, which is also cool.

Shortcut Shell Script

I have a shell script I use to simplify my life on Unix systems. This is the "Git" version, saved as $HOME/bin/g:

PROG=$0

usage() {
      sed -n '/^  *[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9]*)/ {
s?^\(  *[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9]*\)) *cmd="\(.*\)" *;;?\1  \2?
p
}' $PROG >&2
}

lookup=$1
shift

case $lookup in
   a) cmd="git add $*" ;;
   b) cmd="git branch" ;;
   c) cmd="git commit -m \"$*\"" ;;
   d) cmd="git checkout develop $*" ;;
   m) cmd="git checkout master $*" ;;
  pd) cmd="git push origin develop $*" ;;
  pm) cmd="git push origin master $*" ;;
   r) cmd="git checkout -b $*" ;;
   s) cmd="git status -s $*" ;;
  "") usage;;
   *) echo "Not valid." >&2
      usage;;
esac

echo $cmd >&2
eval $cmd

Ideally, any frequently executed commands take only a few keystrokes (not counting any parameters that need to be passed):

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$ g s

git status -s
M  tusc.ahk
?? tusc.ahk.bak

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$ g c fixed multi-lock bug plus usage comments for GoApp

git commit -m "fixed multi-lock bug plus usage comments for GoApp"
[develop 1a39e4d] fixed multi-lock bug plus usage comments for GoApp
 1 files changed, 67 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$ g pd

git push origin develop
Counting objects: 5, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 1.26 KiB, done.
Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:tinypigdotcom/TuSC.git
   ede7073..1a39e4d  develop -> develop

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$

Some people use aliases or functions for this kind of thing, but I like my little script because I feel like it's more portable and also has a built-in command list which I can access just by typing the command key by itself (plus Enter, of course):

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$ g
   a  git add $*
   b  git branch
   c  git commit -m \"$*\"
   d  git checkout develop $*
   m  git checkout master $*
  pd  git push origin develop $*
  pm  git push origin master $*
   r  git checkout -b $*
   s  git status -s $*

~/dev/TuSC (develop)$