binfind

find the path of a binary in your PATH using only bash

The tool which(1) has many different implementations on many different operating systems. Because of this, its output and return codes are not well-defined, and should not be trusted in the context of a script. However, it is often desirable to determine if an executable exists on a filesystem, without having to fork the executable itself to test.

The algorithm which(1) uses is fairly simple: loop over all paths found in the environmental variable PATH, and test for the existence, and executable bit, of the binary in question.

The function below will search your PATH for the binary name given as the first argument, and print the full path of the first binary found and return 0 if it is successful. Otherwise, it won’t print anything, and will return 1.

binfind() {
    local paths path
    IFS=: read -a paths <<< "$PATH"
    for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
        path=${path:-.}/$1
        if [[ -x $path ]]; then
            echo "$path"
            return 0
        fi
    done
    return 1
}

Example usage

$ binfind echo
/bin/echo
$ binfind clang
/usr/bin/clang
$ binfind foobar
$ echo $?
1

You cd around like you normally would, and the directories are pushed into a stack. Use the function s to view the stack of directories, and run s "$num" to cd into the directory listed. Use b to jump back 1 directory.

I was inspired by this article written by Derek Wyatt about directory management in BASH. The code I’ve written for this accomplishes most of the same tasks, but does so with about 1/3 of the code, as this was written specifically for BASH (no legacy KSH bits) and doesn’t implement any of the fancier features for cd.

Example

In the above example I cd around a bit, and then run s to see what the current stack looks like. The current stacks shows all of my previous directories in reverse order (limited to $CD_STACK_MAX entries, which defaults to 15).

The code is on GitHub here https://github.com/bahamas10/bash-cdstack

You sit down to watch the LMN premier of Drew Peterson: Untouchable, when next thing you know, you just watched LMN for the last 6 hours, it is now 4am, and you’re hungry. The obvious question is “What’s open?”, but where do you find the answer?

What’s Open has the answer.

What’s Open is a free service that uses Google Maps to show what places are around you are currently open.

Skye came up with the idea, and I wrote the code.

You can view the site here http://whatsopen.pw

As well as view the source code here https://github.com/bahamas10/whats-open

Does calling fs.writeFileSync trigger a synchronous write to the file system?

If you are familiar with Node.js, or have at least heard of it, you’ve most likely heard that it uses non-blocking IO, and lets you do work asynchronously. One of the most basic APIs that Node provides is for the file system; With this API, you can read, write, remove, etc. files and do other file system related tasks and modifications.

This API follows a standard pattern of exposing 2 functions for each operation: one for asynchronous work, and the other for synchronous work. For example, if you want to read a file in Node you can do so asynchronously:

var fs = require('fs');
fs.readFile('/etc/passwd', function(err, buf) {
  console.log(buf.toString());
});

Node will continue executing any javascript code it encounters while reading the file. Once all javascript is done being executed and the file is ready, it will run the anonymous function and print the file contents.

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I wrote 2 blog posts for the Voxer Engineering Blog. The first post talks about migrating from Hosted Chef to a private, self-hosted Chef instance. The second goes over performance analysis of Chef, and getting it to run 16x faster!

• Chef Part 1 - Migration
• Chef Part 2 - Performance

A command line interface to phillips hue

I wrote a command line tool to interface with hue lights. Check out the project page for more information

https://github.com/bahamas10/hue-cli

Installation

First, install Node.js, then:

npm install -g hue-cli

…and the executable will be installed globally as hue

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Unfreeze a frozen Photoshop on Mac

I wrote an app to unfreeze a stuck or frozen photoshop. If you’re running photoshop, and it starts beachballing, or not responding on you, try running this. This application will help if suddenly you have a frozen photoshop, and you want to fix it.

Download the app

Read more about it here

Buffer calls to console.log, console.warn, etc. for high performance logging

Description

Calls to console.log, console.error, etc. are synchronous, and as such, will block the event loop while the data is being written to a file, terminal, socket, pipe, etc.

This module provides a seamless, drop-in buffer for all calls to these functions, and flushes them when the buffers exceed a certain size (8k by default).

See Known Issues for timing concerns with this module.

View the project on GitHub

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Concurrently curl a list of hosts and print the results

View the project page on GitHub

Usage

Used as a command line tool

pcurl url1 url2 url3 ...

or pipe through stdin

pcurl < newline_sep_list_of_urls.txt

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Convert Unix style permissions to strings like ls (0755 => ‘rwxr-xr-x’)

I wrote this module to make it easy to print out nice looking permissions in my scripts before calling fs.chmod for the user.

Examples

Given

var perms = require('perms');

Convert a mode to a human-readable string like ls(1) generates

var p = perms.toString('0755');
console.log(p);

yields

rwxr-xr-x

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