Whatever hacky script you are writing already exists in GNU Core Utilities

| linux | devops |

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.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

[email protected]/Bluesky

via Manual do Usuário July 15, 2025

Arcadia Finance exploited for $3.5 million

The Arcadia Finance defi margin protocol was exploited for $3.5 million after an attacker found a vulnerability in a project smart contract. The attacker quickly swapped the stolen tokens and bridged them from Base to the Ethereum ma…

via Web3 is Going Just Great July 15, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 15, 2025

Generated by openring