Whatever hacky script you are writing already exists in GNU Core Utilities
When I think of bash, I think of writing hacky scripts that do random things utilizing “bash commands”. It turns out that the parts of bash that “do stuff” such as echo, cut, cat are part of a larger program called GNU Core Utilities.
The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system.These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.Source: Coreutils - GNU core utilities I am working on a general purpose backup utility and this evening I was moments away from writing something like this:
perl -e (print split("/\//", "/foo/bar/baz.tar.gz")
My goal was to try to extract the base file name from a given directory (I recognize that that code does not actually do that). Then I realized that this was pure madness and there had to be a better way. This is when I discovered the handy basename program. It simply does the needful. GNU Core Utilities is full of all sorts of gems such as this one. My main takeaway from this is to read the entire GNU Core Utilities manual so I can stop writing horrible things.
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Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech
I was asked to give a keynote speech at the Rolls-Royce Submarines Developer Conference in February 2025. The post below contains some sanitized details of the talk for both attendees to reference and others to learn from.
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# Today is the fourth anniversary of switching to my own custom CMS. It doesn't seem possible that I've been using it for that long. Each year I've written about the major changes; these last 12 months have had the least. I started strong with …
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