I use bash's history all the time, via ctrl+r and also with the up and down keys; it's wonderful. Sometimes, I want to get back to the end of my history and I recently discovered that there's a shortcut for this: meta+>. It doesn't matter where you are in your history, pressing meta+> jumps you to the end and you…
#shell scripting
11 posts
16 Sept 2025
2 Sept 2025
Recently, since getting a new computer, I've noticed that I've been losing bash history items and it took a while to work out what was going on, though I'm still not completely sure as it never seemed to be so much of a problem. I regularly use the up and down keys with context specific history. For example, I will…
15 Jul 2025
I've been writing a simple Swift command line tool called QuickSS. It's a single file swift file, that I compile to a standalone binaryusing: swiftc quickss.swift -o quickss To distribute it on modern Macs, I need to sign it and then get Apple to notarise it. Signing the binary To sign the binary, you need a "Developer ID Application" certificate…
8 Jul 2025
I'm currently writing a script that notarises a macOS CLI app which needs to access a password. Rather than put it in an environment variable, I thought I'd use the 1Password CLI. This is the first time I've used it, so these are my notes. The 1Password CLI tool is call op. I installed it via Homebrew with: brew install…
30 Jul 2024
Recently, I was writing a bash script that read a file into a string and then passed that string elsewhere that then calculated the hash of it. To my surprise, I was getting a different hash to doing the equivalent in PHP with file_get_contents(). Digging into it, I discovered that when you assign the output of cat to a variable,…
23 Jul 2024
If you want to see the hex values of a file, the easiest way to do this is to use xxd. Given foo.txt that contains "This is some text!": $ xxd foo.txt 00000000: 5468 6973 2069 7320 736f 6d65 2074 6578 This is some tex 00000010: 7421 0a t!. There are three columns in the output: number of first character…
2 Jul 2024
When printing output in a shell script, it's quite useful to be able to indent information to group it. The easiest way to do this is with pr, like this: body=$(curl -s "http://localhost:8888/") echo "Response:" echo "$body" | pr -to 4 This generates: Response: { "links": { "games": "/games" } } Given that pr appeared in version 1 of AT&T…
18 Jun 2024
When writing a shell script recently, I realised that it would be really handy to get the the status code from a curl command in addition to the body. Usually, I call curl like this: body=$(curl -s "http://localhost:8888/") echo "Curl exit code: $?" echo "Body: $body" This works well, but no status code is available as curl's exit code is…
4 Jun 2024
My accountant recently moved my business accounts system over to FreeAgent. One thing I like to do is keep a copy of every invoice PDF that I issue in a folder on my computer as a back up, just in case the online systems let me down. As I was learning new systems, I took advantage of this time to…
28 May 2024
One thing that I like to do is write a script for seemingly trivial things that I do more than once. I do this as it turns out that I end up needing them again. One example is a pair of script I use when testing rst2pdf. rst2pdf's tests work by creating a PDF and then comparing this to a…
1 Nov 2023
I have a set of Markdown files with YAML front matter that contains a created property containing the date that the file was created. Due to various machinations, the file creation date no longer matches this date, so I thought I'd fix this. Setting created date of a file On macOS, to change a file's creation date you use SetFile…