= Gopher Logging in Eleven Lines of Shell = Writing today's entry is a bit tricky because I'm writing it with the help of the very thing I'm writing about; describing the thing with the thing. It feels a little like "Drawing Hands", the MC Escher lithograph where a pair of hands draws each other into existance. As the title suggests, I finally broke down and scripted these phlog entries using a shell script. I've always said "make the computer do the work", but I often get myself into trouble by putting the cart before the horse: inventing automation for things I haven't done yet even once manually. Not this time; I waited until I had a whole three entries under my belt before having my first go at automation. A whole three! I'm practically an old hand, now. Further, I practiced great restraint in the automation. In fact, I turned the restraint into a bit of a challenge: just how *little* programming would yield a phlog entry generator? So here are the eleven lines: today.sh ------------------------------------------------------------------ #!/bin/sh title=$1 date=$(date +%Y-%m-%d) fname="$date-$(echo "$title" | tr ' ' '-')" srcpath="src/phlog/$fname" if [ ! -f $srcpath ]; then echo "= $title =" >> $srcpath; fi vim $srcpath sed "s//$date/" src/gophermap > publish/goph... fmt -w67 $srcpath > publish/phlog/$fname scp publish/gophermap $sdf:gopher/ scp publish/phlog/$fname $sdf:gopher/phlog/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ To create this entry, I typed (let's see...CTRL-Z...) $ ./today.sh "Gopher Logging in Eleven Lines of Shell" Which created the file you're now reading and wrote the title at the top. As soon as I finish editing this, it will pass the file through 'fmt' to reflow the paragraphs to a mainframe-worthy 67 columns, and then upload the result to my Gopher space on SDF.org. The neat bit, as you may have noticed above, is that I have also turned my gophermap file into an ad-hoc template by putting a placeholder on this line: Last updated: Which is replaced by the 'sed' command with the current date. The new gophermap is also written and uploaded. It was quick and practically effortless. Shell scripts would suck if they weren't so insanely productive. Here's what the structure looks like: dave@wizard~/d/proj/sdf/gopher$ tree . ├── publish │   ├── gophermap │   └── phlog │   ├── 2018-08-09-First-Post │   ├── 2018-08-10-The-Logging-Habit │   └── 2018-08-12-Weekend-Tech-Scramble ├── src │   ├── gophermap │   └── phlog │   ├── 2018-08-09-First-Post │   ├── 2018-08-10-The-Logging-Habit │   ├── 2018-08-12-Weekend-Tech-Scramble │   └── 2018-08-13-Gopher-Logging-in-Elev... └── today.sh 4 directories, 10 files As soon as I save this, the new entry will end up in the publish/ directory with the rest. I doubt my Gopher software will remain a mere eleven lines for long. But for now, I'm reveling in the minimalism. I'll try to hold off on complexity for as long as I can. Oh, and I must add that I would absolutely be using 'rsync', but it turns out that you have to be a MetaARPA member on SDF to have permission to use it. Thus the two 'scp' calls. I could use 'scp -r' to recursively copy everything in publish/, but that would just be wasteful, especially when I get more content up here. * * * It was very nice meeting some of you on IRC (irc.sdf.org) on the #gopher channel. This is a very warm little community so far and I feel very much at home here in my little burrow. Good night my fellow rodents! * * * Next morning update: Naturally there was a mistake in one of the "eleven lines" and my script happily published the *unformatted* version of the entry. My appologies to anyone who tried to read it and found the text flowing off the screen. I knew I should have tested it, but it was late at night...which led to bad descisions...which is why I have a strict policy about not doing critical things when I am tired. I've corrected the script (and the copy of it above). We'll see if I got it right when I push out today's entry. :-)