GregDavidson/UtilityScripts

~/SW: My utility script collection

TL;DR: Here May Be Dragons!

Most of the utility scripts in this repository are ancient and many will do nothing useful on modern platforms! A few are gems which will greatly contribute to the quality of your computing experience. Now that I’ve reified this collection to a public git repository I may (no promises!) slowly

• add some guidance as to which utilities here are still useful
• add some documentation as to how to use those gems
• improve some of these utilities
• remove or hide some of the salvageable dross

You might enjoy the bit of POSIX shell code at the bottom!

Details

I’ve been using POSIX Systems since 1976, including

Many BSD Variants

powerful and elegant!

Bell Labs Research Unix

elegant but not so powerful

AT&T System V Unix

the less said, the better!

GNU/Linux

rich and powerful, not elegant!

Over the years I’ve written lots of small utility scripts in shells and other interpreted languages and a few small utility programs in compiled languages. Most of them have migrated to being somewhere under this ~/SW/ hierarchy, although I still have some of them under ~/Bin and other places.

Amazingly, most of these have continued to work across the changes and evolution of different POSIX platforms. Many of these utilities are now obsolete, even where they still run. See the TL;DR above for my hopes in this regard.

I have login scripts which add the appropriate directories into my path, e.g. with code like this:

shopt -s nullglob
for d in ~/[Bb]in ~/SW/*/[Bb]in{,-`arch`} ~/Shared/Bin /usr/bin/mh ~/.cargo/bin /usr/local/SW/*/[Bb]in
do
  case ":$PATH:" in
      ":$d:") ;;
      *) PATH="$d:$PATH" ;;
  esac
done
export PATH
shopt -u nullglob

P.S. My 1976 Research Unix System had a 4K x 4K graphics system with 3D graphics - smoothly scalable and transformable in realtime! It was better in many ways than most of what’s available now. But of course I didn’t own it as it cost at least a quarter of a million 1976 dollars! My unpaid and underpaid work in those days was automatically owned by the University of California - that’s capitalism for you!

I love owning or freely sharing the means of my production and I hope to soon have something as nice or better than I had in 1976!