clinte

Command-line community notice board for public-access UNIX systems. Post text-only notes for other users to see.

Features

Username is tagged based on the executing user
Shows the 15 most recent posts in descending order
Able to edit or delete your own posts
Title <= 30 chars
Body <= 500 chars
Calls $EDITOR when creating or modifying the body of a post
If $EDITOR is unset, calls nano
Stores posts in JSON
Uses advisory locking via flock(2) to synchronize access to the posts file

Installation

Clone the repository and jump into the directory:

$ git clone git://github.com/gbmor/clinte.git
...
$ cd clinte

Run the makefile and install:

$ make
...
...Done!

$ sudo make install

Upgrading

Note: v1.0.0 used sqlite3, which presented some issues. v2.x uses a json structure for posts, as this will be safer on a multi-user system. When upgrading from v1.0.0 to v2.x, you won't be able to save the posts without using a third-party tool to dump the posts table to json, and manually adjusting it to fit the expected format (which can be seen in the included clinte.json).

If upgrading from v1.0.0 -> v2.x, do a fresh install, including removing the database directory /usr/local/clinte. The following applies to upgrading when already running at least v2.0.0

$ make update
$ make
$ make install

This will:

checkout master
pull / rebase changes from upstream
checkout the latest tag
rebuild
replace the clinte binary, but leave the posts file untouched.

Usage

Issuing the program name itself will list the currently available posts, like in the screenshot above.

Display recent posts

$ clinte

Create a post

$ clinte post

clinte will then ask for the title of the post, and the body. The username will be tagged automatically by your logged-in username, reflecting its intended use on multi-user UNIX-like systems.

Edit a post

$ clinte update [id]

If the [id] argument is absent, clinte will ask for the ID number of the post. If it's been authored by you, then you will be asked for the new title. Your $EDITOR will be called, and will be populated with the previous body.

Delete a post

$ clinte delete [id]

If the [id] argument is absent, clinte asks for the numeric ID of the post to delete.

Verbose logging

$ clinte -v [post|update|delete] [id]

Use this flag if something's going wrong. Additional information will be written to `/tmp/clinte_$USER.log** that will, hopefully, reveal the cause of the error.

Line Wrapping

$ clinte -l 80

Wraps posts at the given line length. Set to <10 to disable line wrapping. Defaults to 80.

Notes

The file where the posts are stored, /usr/local/clinte/clinte.json, must be writeable by all users on the system. Keep this in mind.

The main project is at sr.ht/~gbmor/clinte, with a mirror at github.com/gbmor/clinte. Please send patches to ~gbmor/clinte@lists.sr.ht. For more info on this workflow, check out git send-email