Trivial tools
There are various trivial command-line tools which I (have had to) create because of various reasons. Below are some of them:
norepeat
I didn't want to write this, but couldn't find any existing cli tool on CPAN or Debian. Since I put reminders on my ~/.bash_profile and I open many many terminals in a day, I needed a way to run some scripts just once a day. It's surprising that I couldn't find a tool to let me do it easily, and I hope someone can correct me on this.
exec-if-env
This began when I wanted to do something like:
if [[ "$OFFLINE" =="" ]]; then do-some-thing-that-needs-internet ...; done
in dist.ini to be run by Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Run. But of course you'll have to write something like this instead for it to work:
bash -c 'if [[ "$OFFLINE" =="" ]]; then do-some-thing-that-needs-internet ...; done'
which will get even more unreadable when you nest it or combine it with another command (like norepeat). And it does not work on Windows without bash. So exec-if-env (and exec-if-not-env) was born. This allows you to simplify your command line, e.g.:
norepeat --period daily -- exec-if-not-env OFFLINE do-some-thing-that-needs-internet
check-yaml and check-json
Some of my applications use YAML config file, some use JSON. And of course, users invariably write/edit YAML and JSON with syntax errors in them. Especially YAML. I prefer to tell my users about check-yaml and check-json rather than instructing them to type something like:
% perl -MYAML -E'Load(~~<>)' /path/to/some/file.yaml
What are some of the trivial tools you have created?
A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays).
My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.
Test::CPAN::Meta::YAML, Test::CPAN::Meta::JSON??
I copied and pasted some code from Pod::HtmlEasy's man page to create a simple p2h program to test how my pod would look on CPAN. There are other ways, but this one works ok. Manually opening the resulting page is a bummer, but not much of a time waster.
use Pod::HtmlEasy;
my $filename = shift @ARGV;
my $podhtml = Pod::HtmlEasy->new();
$podhtml->pod2html($filename, output => "$filename.html", parserwarn => 1);
I also used to use a version of regex-test.pl from Learning Perl to test regex's that could take a command line argument of the regex to test against, but that was barely helpful. And mostly resulted in me just guessing over and over until I beat the regex into submission, and it worked the way I wanted it to. But then I found Regexp::Debugger, which is completely amazing. It's rxrx command line program rocks, and provides a step by step debugger for regexes. All of the back tracking is really eye opening and surprising.
After editing various files within a module (all under 'lib'), I check whether or not I should do a full build of a distro with compile.sh:
#!/bin/bash
find lib -name \*.pm -exec perl -Ilib -c {} \;
tt -- talking timer. Takes a /bin/sleep timespec, or a /usr/bin/at timespec, and then a phrase to say via /usr/bin/espeak text-to-speech.
wup -- wait for a host to go down and come back up, then send a desktop notification. So when I do a shutdown -r now on a remote machine, I can exit the SSH session and wup remotehost and go do something else while the server reboots.
rfc1345 -- search the RFC1345 spec for the digraph needed to type all those funny characters.
pageme -- sends an SMS to my phone.