A reader writes in to report that Accuweather has changed their Web page layout and the shell script from Wicked Cool Shell Scripts that returns the weather forecast (script #63, weather.sh), is broken.

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If you find yourself working on the command line and need to whip out a quick statistical analysis or two, you’ll be glad to know that Wicked Cool Shell Scripts fan Josh Kotecha has sent in a very nice little shell script that does just that using the scriptbc script included in the book.

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Another hiccup in a script included in Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, one that’s a subtle problem because it sometimes occurs because of a user-set LS_OPTIONS flag. Script #37, bestcompress, has the following sequence:

smallest="$(ls -l "$name" $Zout $gzout $bzout | \
awk '{print $5"="NR}' | sort -n | cut -d= -f2 | head -1)"

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A reader of my new book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts pointed out that the capability of testing a file permission with find using the ‘+’ notation is GNU-specific.

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I’ve been discussing the key tasks that a Mac OS X user has to run to ensure that their system stays healthy and in tip-top shape, and one set that we’ve all agreed upon are the daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs. You can figure out when they’re run with a simple grep command.

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