nosh VS sysbox

Program that interfaces AutoHotKey and youtube-dl so that I can easily play or download things with shortcuts. Haven't played a youtube video from the actual website in years (don't tell anyone).

Program that lets me keep track of the last time I did something (brush teeth, exercise, vacuum the floors, etc), which motivates me to do these things more regularly.

Program to convert between various units of bits, mostly so that I could do a calculation regarding download speeds.

Program to run programs without a shell, so that I could run certain commands on startup (it was faster to implement than to find an existing solution) [1].

Library to dump various useful information out of a Pokemon ROM, so that I could play the game more efficiently [2].

Playing card library, so that I could simulate certain solitaire games and figure out the chances of winning [3].

Program to quickly parse and generate markdown files from source code comments, existing solutions being too complex or not working quite the way I wanted [4]. This one ended up being a real winner, because it let me stop worrying about presentation and get back to writing code/documentation.

There's this sort of multi-tool I've been working on for game development on Roblox (very niche) [5]. A high-level overview is that it uses scripting to streamline certain workflows that would otherwise be tedious, such as parsing proprietary file formats, interacting with web APIs, or assembling a project into a final product. It's a winner because it lets me make even more tools for myself.

[1]: https://github.com/Anaminus/nosh

Yes, I first learned this and the name "splay" from CFengine, back in the day.

I put together a small busybox-like collection of sysadmin tools, and one of the subcommands is "splay" to sleep for a random amount of time. It's one of those things that is useful surprisingly often, even outside cron.

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I remember in 1999 there was a project to reimplement a bunch of these tools in perl:

https://perlpowertools.com/

I even contributed a little, back then. I guess writing basic versions of "ls", for example, is trivial. But there's a lot of work getting all the tools done, with all the flags implemented and behaving as expected.

I guess there are tools like busybox, toybox, and similar, which also implement a lot of "stuff" to varying degrees of completion. From my side the biggest takeaway from those projects is the sheer convenience of deploying a single binary and installing symlinks to change functionality.

I replicated something similar with my sysbox project, collecting tools together in one golang binary with various subcommands:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I use at least one of those tools on a daily basis, though I suspect they're not so universally useful.

If you've got perl installed you'll might have a "GET" binary present, mine is /usr/bin/GET, which comes with the WWW-module.

Although this is written in portable perl, rather than being compiled, so the static vs. dynamic choice doesn't really mean much it is a simple alternative.

Otherwise I built a simple busybox-inspired collection of tools, written in golang, which includes a simple HTTP client too:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are just a couple of examples, I'm certain there are multiple other choices out there. But I guess curl is ubiquitous enough that most people just use it directly, and add it when missing!

That's pretty cool.

I wrote something similar in my static collection of sysadmin tools - https://github.com/skx/sysbox - In my simple pre-processor I only allow two special things:

#include "file/goes/here"

I bundled together a small collection of sysadmin/scripting-tools here:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are probably amongst the things that I use most often which are non-standard.

I used to have very full ~/bin, and ~/$(hostname), directories. In the end I pared them back and started bundling things together in one binary.

The end result is very similar to this approach, I run "sysbox blah", or "sysbox help", and use integrated subcommands.

Very helpful and makes deployment easy by having only a single binary:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Not bash/shell, but similar and useful idea to experiment with.

I support that in my sysbox utility-box, via the subcommands processor, and it is very helpful.