Scripting (2 blogmarks)

Ruby is a really good Unix citizen and I think it’s woefully underused as a general-purpose "scripting" language.

This article is a nice background and introduction to using Ruby for scripting. I've always felt that small, expressive scripts are one of Ruby's strong suits. When I need a personal one-off script to automate a set of steps, I almost always reach for Ruby.

Here is a fun tidbit:

I think this ancestral timeline may be interesting:

• 1977 AWK by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan

• 1987 Perl by Larry Wall

• 1995 Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto

I had no idea that awk was so named because it is the initials of the creators.

This is the root wiki page for ShellCheck which lists all of the rules that it enforces when checking your scripts.

Each rule links to a page that describes the issue, shows you an example of the problematic code, and a corrected version.

E.g. SC1003 Want to escape a single quote? echo 'This is how it'\''s done.' shows:

Problematic code:

echo 'this is not how it\'s done'

Corrected code:

echo 'this is how it'\''s done'