The find utility is so useful for automation that it deserves a special mention on its own. I will not attempt to cover all of its features, only the ones that I use on a daily basis. I typically use find for two purposes: To create a list of files matching some search terms. To [...]
Tee is a wonderful but often-overlooked core utility. It’s purpose is to intercept a pipeline, write the output to a file, and pass the output along the pipe. It can be used to easily add output logging to any command pipeline or script. To get the most out of tee, it pays to read up [...]
Using just the shell and the coreutils, it is possible to write commands which wrangle massive amounts of files, translate data into the format you want, etc. But what if you want to take things to the next level? This is where scripting comes in. You can write scripts which are capable of performing a [...]
From here on out, I’m going to assume that you have access to a Unix environment. If you use Windows, I suggest that you install Cygwin to get a Unix environment on your machine if you want to follow along. The default Windows terminal is also pretty crappy so I recommend installing the rxvt-native terminal from within [...]
Anything that’s tedious is repeatable; anything that’s repeatable should be done by a computer. -Robert Muller I spend a lot of time working on my computer every day. Many of the tasks that I need to perform on a computer can be incredibly tedious. Copying and pasting text from a website into a spreadsheet. Renaming [...]
My name is Eliot. I love learning, I love programming, and I love making games. Welcome to my website!
