Nano hacks: most useful tiny programs you've coded or come across

Question

It's the first great virtue of programmers. All of us have, at one time or another automated a task with a bit of throw-away code. Sometimes it takes a couple seconds tapping out a one-liner, sometimes we spend an exorbitant amount of time automating away a two-second task and then never use it again.

What tiny hack have you found useful enough to reuse? To make go so far as to make an alias for?

Note: before answering, please check to make sure it's not already on favourite command-line tricks using BASH or perl/ruby one-liner questions.

Answer 1

Sorry, don't have the exact code handy, but I coded a regular expression for searching source code in VS.Net that allowed me to search anything not in comments. It came in very useful in a particular project I was working on, where people insisted that commenting out code was good practice, in case you wanted to go back and see what the code used to do.

Answer 2

This goes back to my COBOL days but I had two generic COBOL programs, one batch and one online (mainframe folks will know what these are). They were shells of a program that could take any set of parameters and/or files and be run, batch or executed in an IMS test region. I had them set up so that depending on the parameters I could access files, databases(DB2 or IMS DB) and or just manipulate working storage or whatever.

It was great because I could test that date function without guessing or test why there was truncation or why there was a database ABEND. The programs grew in size as time went on to include all sorts of tests and become a staple of the development group. Everyone knew where the code resided and included them in their unit testing as well. Those programs got so large (most of the code were commented out tests) and it was all contributed by people through the years. They saved so much time and settled so many disagreements!

Answer 3

I coded a Perl script to map dependencies, without going into an endless loop, For a legacy C program I inherited .... that also had a diamond dependency problem.

I wrote small program that e-mailed me when I received e-mails from friends, on an rarely used e-mail account.

I wrote another small program that sent me text messages if my home IP changes.

To name a few.

Answer 4

Years ago I built a suite of applications on a custom web application platform in PERL. One cool feature was to convert SQL query strings into human readable sentences that described what the results were.

The code was relatively short but the end effect was nice.

Answer 5

I've got a little app that you run and it dumps a GUID into the clipboard. You can run it /noui or not. With UI, its a single button that drops a new GUID every time you click it. Without it drops a new one and then exits.

I mostly use it from within VS. I have it as an external app and mapped to a shortcut. I'm writing an app that relies heavily on xaml and guids, so I always find I need to paste a new guid into xaml...

Answer 6

I have two ruby scripts that I modify regularly to download all of various webcomics. Extremely handy! Note: They require wget, so probably linux. Note2: read these before you try them, they need a little bit of modification for each site.

Date based downloader:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

Day = 60 * 60 * 24

Fromat = "hjlsdahjsd/comics/st%Y%m%d.gif"

t = Time.local(2005, 2, 5)

MWF = [1,3,5]

until t == Time.local(2007, 7, 9)
  if MWF.include? t.wday
    `wget #{t.strftime(Fromat)}`
    sleep 3
  end

  t += Day
end

Or you can use the number based one:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

Fromat = "http://fdsafdsa/comics/%08d.gif"
1.upto(986) do |i|
  `wget #{sprintf(Fromat, i)}`
  sleep 1
end

Answer 7

I use this script under assorted linuxes to check whether a directory copy between machines (or to CD/DVD) worked or whether copying (e.g. ext3 utf8 filenames -> fusebl k) has mangled special characters in the filenames.

#!/bin/bash
##  dsum Do checksums recursively over a directory.
##  Typical usage: dsum <directory>  > outfile

export LC_ALL=C  # Optional - use sort order across different locales

if [ $# != 1 ]; then echo "Usage: ${0/*\//} <directory>" 1>&2; exit; fi
cd $1 1>&2 || exit
#findargs=-follow    # Uncomment to follow symbolic links
find . $findargs -type f | sort | xargs -d'\n' cksum

Answer 8

Any time I write a clever list comprehension or use of map/reduce in python. There was one like this:

if reduce(lambda x, c: locks[x] and c, locknames, True):
    print "Sub-threads terminated!"

The reason I remember that is that I came up with it myself, then saw the exact same code on somebody else's website. Now-adays it'd probably be done like:

if all(map(lambda z: locks[z], locknames)):
    print "ya trik"

Answer 9

i found this on dotfiles.org just today. it's very simple, but clever. i felt stupid for not having thought of it myself.

###
###   Handy Extract Program
###
extract () {
     if [ -f $1 ] ; then
         case $1 in
             *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1        ;;
             *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1     ;;
             *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1       ;;
             *.rar)       unrar x $1     ;;
             *.gz)        gunzip $1     ;;
             *.tar)       tar xvf $1        ;;
             *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1      ;;
             *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1       ;;
             *.zip)       unzip $1     ;;
             *.Z)         uncompress $1  ;;
             *.7z)        7z x $1    ;;
             *)           echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via >extract<" ;;
         esac
    else
         echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
    fi
}

Answer 10

Here's a filter that puts commas in the middle of any large numbers in standard input.

$ cat ~/bin/comma
#!/usr/bin/perl -p

s/(\d{4,})/commify($1)/ge;

sub commify {
    local $_  = shift;
    1 while s/^([ -+]?\d+)(\d{3})/$1,$2/;
    return $_;
}

I usually wind up using it for long output lists of big numbers, and I tire of counting decimal places. Now instead of seeing

-rw-r--r--   1 alester alester 2244487404 Oct  6 15:38 listdetail.sql

I can run that as ls -l | comma and see

-rw-r--r--   1 alester alester 2,244,487,404 Oct  6 15:38 listdetail.sql

Answer 11

I've got 20 or 30 of these things lying around because once I coded up the framework for my standard console app in windows I can pretty much drop in any logic I want, so I got a lot of these little things that solve specific problems.

I guess the ones I'm using a lot right now is a console app that takes stdin and colorizes the output based on xml profiles that match regular expressions to colors. I use it for watching my log files from builds. The other one is a command line launcher so I don't pollute my PATH env var and it would exceed the limit on some systems anyway, namely win2k.

Answer 12

Instead of having to repeatedly open files in SQL Query Analyser and run them, I found the syntax needed to make a batch file, and could then run 100 at once. Oh the sweet sweet joy! I've used this ever since.

isqlw -S servername -d dbname -E -i F:\blah\whatever.sql -o F:\results.txt

Answer 13

I'm constantly connecting to various linux servers from my own desktop throughout my workday, so I created a few aliases that will launch an xterm on those machines and set the title, background color, and other tweaks:

alias  x="xterm"         # local
alias xd="ssh -Xf me@development_host xterm -bg aliceblue -ls -sb -bc -geometry 100x30 -title Development"
alias xp="ssh -Xf me@production_host  xterm -bg thistle1 ..."

Answer 14

I have a bunch of servers I frequently connect to, as well, but they're all on my local network. This Ruby script prints out the command to create aliases for any machine with ssh open:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'dnssd'

handle = DNSSD.browse('_ssh._tcp') do |reply|
  print "alias #{reply.name}='ssh #{reply.name}.#{reply.domain}';"
end

sleep 1
handle.stop

Use it like this in your .bash_profile:

eval `ruby ~/.alias_shares`

Answer 15

This script saved my career!

Quite a few years ago, i was working remotely on a client database. I updated a shipment to change its status. But I forgot the where clause.

I'll never forget the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw (6834 rows affected). I basically spent the entire night going through event logs and figuring out the proper status on all those shipments. Crap!

So I wrote a script (originally in awk) that would start a transaction for any updates, and check the rows affected before committing. This prevented any surprises.

So now I never do updates from command line without going through a script like this. Here it is (now in Python):

import sys
import subprocess as sp
pgm = "isql"
if  len(sys.argv) == 1:
    print "Usage: \nsql sql-string [rows-affected]"
    sys.exit()
sql_str = sys.argv[1].upper()
max_rows_affected = 3
if len(sys.argv) > 2:
    max_rows_affected = int(sys.argv[2])

if sql_str.startswith("UPDATE"):
    sql_str = "BEGIN TRANSACTION\\n" + sql_str
    p1 = sp.Popen([pgm, sql_str],stdout=sp.PIPE,
            shell=True)
    (stdout, stderr) = p1.communicate()
    print  stdout
    # example -> (33 rows affected)
    affected = stdout.splitlines()[-1]
    affected = affected.split()[0].lstrip('(')
    num_affected = int(affected)
    if num_affected > max_rows_affected:
        print "WARNING! ", num_affected,"rows were affected, rolling back..."
        sql_str = "ROLLBACK TRANSACTION"
        ret_code = sp.call([pgm, sql_str], shell=True)
    else:
        sql_str = "COMMIT TRANSACTION"
        ret_code = sp.call([pgm, sql_str], shell=True)
else:
    ret_code = sp.call([pgm, sql_str], shell=True)