I’ve spent a lot of time poking around with my extensive iTunes database and had lots of fun figuring out different ways to address my needs with a fully digitized music collection. When a reader asked whether there was a way to just list those artists in her iTunes collection for whom she had more than one album, I thought “ah, this sounds up my alley”, and so it is.
More than once, readers have written to me, asking if it was possible to track an RSS feed from a Weblog or news site with a shell script. Sounds kinda wacky, but in fact, it’s a very good use of a shell script, as the following rather extensive entry — including source code! — demonstrates. If you’re a bit confused by the following, you might want to consider picking up a copy of my best-selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts.
A reader writes:
“I’ve been reading your book Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and learning a lot, but I’m stuck on a disk usage problem. Suppose there are 5 people (A, B, C, D, E) in our group
and they share the same directory called “group.” The total capacity of this
directory is 100 GB. I’m looking for a program/command/script that can be
run to generate the following space usage update:A 5 5% B 10 10% C 20 20% D 40 40% E 5 5% total 80 80% free space 20%
This is an interesting question, so let’s dig into it and see what we can figure out…
A reader writes:
I’ve started to go through your shell script book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts but there is still something I’m unclear on. I’m showing my ignorance here, but how
exactly do you save a shell script so you can use it later?”
A reader writes:
I have your Wicked Cool book and love it. I am new at scripting and it is helping a ton. Question. I need a script to use the timestamp feature (ingenious by the way) of Script #83 but “get” the files from a remote server like Script #82. Do you have one modified in such a way?
It’s not uncommon for me to receive email from people asking for information that’s covered in one or more of my books, and this morning I received a message asking about good places to go online to learn more about shell script programming. My answer, of course, is to buy a copy of my best selling book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, but if that’s not in your budget, there’s another possibility to explore.
A reader writes:
Every *nix implementation is different. But I’m seeing some some shared behavior between HPUX and Solaris with script #52 Killing Processes by Name. The problem is that the script is trying to kill the “tty” name, instead of the pid.
Wish I understood the following line better so I could make it grab the right columns. :-\
pids=$(ps cu -U $user | awk “/ $1$/ { print \$2 }”)
A reader writes:
First, thanks for writing Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. I’ve found them quite useful and I’ve learned many things from those scripts.
I just have a question and I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.I’m trying to write a shell script that will pull the top-level directories out of a list of file paths, example:
list of files:
/usr/local/test
/usr/bin/test
/opt/Tivoli/dat
/opt/lib/test
/tmp/files/test
/tmp/local/testOutput after script:
/usr
/opt
/tmp
