Living in the Shell #1

Written by Anachron on 2023-06-24

Read the article or go back.

1. Introduction
2. Collection
3. The unix way
4. 4 letters
5. Workflows
6. More to come
7. Comments

# Introduction

I hereby introduce my mini-series: Living in the Shell

For a long time now I have been mostly living inside the linux shell. Because I got so many self-written little scripts, I wanted to elaborate why I do this and how this makes sense for me (and most probably for you too!).

# Collection

Running find -type f | grep -v 'awk' | wc -l inside my ~/bin returns 304.

What do I need 300 shell scripts for you might ask? Well, let’s dive right in.

# The unix way

Within the last 10 years or so of my usage with Linux I’ve created a ton of utilities that I use daily, weekly or less. But that does not mean these scripts are useless.

I try to automate things when one or more of the following things are true:

• These tasks are mundane and often
• These tasks are important
• These tasks are time-eating
• These tasks are easy to get wrong
• These tasks need to be run periodically
• These tasks are in a chain of other events/tasks
• (… and so on)

I give you a few examples:

• mksh: Stands for Make Shell Script and creates a simple shell script at the target location and opens it in an editor
• blog: My blog generator. Just around 50LOC but generates the pages, writes an atom feed and an index page.
• emoji: Translates text like :-) to the appropiate emoji in my current icon font
• slug: Create a slug from an input text
• arnf: Automatically renames a file to it’s slug (see above)
• lstf: A find wrapper that is more convinient
• imgc: Uses rawtherapee-cli to automatically extract exif information of the camera and the used lense to apply retouch filters (also respects ISO)
• aimd: A script to automatically handle image workflows:
  • Moves images in the right directory (Retouched, Converted, Old)
  • Converts images using imgc
  • Finds files using lstf
• cmlg: Finds all shell scripts and prints their short description in a list
• fart: Probably my favorite script. Fetches Album Art for local music

# 4 letters

I recognized you are using 4 letters for script names only?

Yes, very good observation! When possible, I try to use 4-5 letters for my script name.

Because I don’t feel like typing rawtherapee-cli again and again and creating an alias defeats the purpose of having a long name in the first place.

This is also way easier (at least for me) to understand: lstf | xargs -L1 arnf (This lists all files in current directory and converts their names, if not done already)

# Workflows

Currently I have a few workflows that I manage periodically:

• Scan a document and automatically convert it to PDF (with searchable text) using tesseract and name the document accordingly. (like topic-person-date.pdf)
• Import images from my camera, move them accordingly convert them, run filters and create a gallery
• Handle new music and transcode it, fetch art if missing
• Create (network) backups regulary on all computers on my NAS and sync it daily to my cloud storage space
• Convert my daily appointments to a format that my desktop alert manager understands and feed it into said program
• (that’s all from the top of my head)

# More to come

This is just the first post of my new series. There are a lot of things I could (and want!) to write about, so the next posts will probably dig a bit deeper into my workflow.