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  • The box arrived from NoStarch Press and …

The box arrived from NoStarch Press and …

February 6, 2004 / Dave Taylor / Writing and Publishing / 4 Comments




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!

About the Author: Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since the early days of the Internet. Author of over 20 technical books, he runs the popular AskDaveTaylor.com tech help site. You can also find his gadget reviews on YouTube and chat with him on Twitter as @DaveTaylor.

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Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

4 comments on “The box arrived from NoStarch Press and …”

  1. Dave Taylor says:
    April 25, 2004 at 11:32 pm

    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…

    Reply
  2. Dennis Brunskill says:
    April 20, 2004 at 1:10 pm

    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. ???

    Reply
  3. Dave T. says:
    March 19, 2004 at 11:57 pm

    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. 🙂

    Reply
  4. Steve Macdonald says:
    March 18, 2004 at 10:33 am

    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

    Reply

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