It’s official. Wicked Cool
Shell Scripts is a real book. I have a copy in my hands right now, and another twenty or so on my shelf. My kudos to NoStarch Press for a job well done!
Curious about the topic? It’s 101 great shell scripts for Unix, Linux and Mac OS X systems, each presented in its entirety with detailed explanations, sample input and output, and suggestions on ways you can hack it to go even further. Scripts range from Apache log file analysis tools to Web site scrapers, Mac OS X account management utilities to a version of the game hangman for your edification.
It’s a good book. Check it out!
Thanks for your note, Dennis. You’re correct: it turns out that by default the ls command wants to sort filenames alphabetically, which turns out to be a problem with this particular script. The good news is that it’s super easy to fix: instead of using “ls -l” in this script use “ls -lf” instead. There’s a more detailed explanation on the main page of the booktalk weblog…
Am very interested in your book after seeing you on the Screen Savers last night (4/19/04). I tried the bestcompress script but it looks like I’m getting incorrect results. I’m running it on a 7767 txt file and it reports compress as the best choice resulting in a compressed file size of 4493. If however I run gzip and bzip2 on the txt file I get file sizes of 3715 and 3559 respectively. So it dosen’t appear that compress is the best choice and bestcompress is not comparing the file sizes correctly. ???
As you reported to me in email, your problem was that you’d copied the cut statements like this:
month=”$(echo $newdate | cut -d\ -f1)”
day=”$(echo $newdate | cut -d\ -f2)”
year=”$(echo $newdate | cut -d\ -f3)”
The problem is that you need TWO spaces after the backslash. Fix that, and it works fine. 🙂
In script #7 under MacOS 10.2.8; I get a cut error:
[home:~/scripts] smac% valid-date november 25 1963
usage: cut -c list [file1 …]
cut -f list [-s] [-d delim] [file …]
usage: cut -c list [file1 …]
cut -f list [-s] [-d delim] [file …]
usage: cut -c list [file1 …]
cut -f list [-s] [-d delim] [file …]
valid-date: Unknown month name 25
It appears that its taking the second field for the month,
rather than the first. It fails on every date entered.
I’ve verified that normdate works properly:
[home:~/scripts] smac% normdate november 25 1963
Nov 25 1963
… and I freely admit that I’m a clueless puppy trying to learn scripting by doing.
Help? 🙂
smac