nq VS miller

If you want something quick and janky, I suggest nq. It's stupidly simple and lightweight; it just requires that everyone is running as the same user. And only lets exactly one job of any kind run in a given queue. There's basically zero configuration; just nq , and it'll either start running , or will wait its turn.

For your ad-hoc uses, I would introduce nq. It's an extremely lightweight queuing system, which gives you two things with minimal overhead:

I'm already aware of alternatives which I will consider (at, nq, snooze, but I still want an accurate lightweight CLI stopwatch/timer app and the script otherwise works well--this is more of an exercise on understanding background processes and could be handy in other scripts. Or if the attempt is considdered hacky and ill-advised, I'm curious of an alternative implementation. I just feel nothing is more simple than a very lightweight C-based timer app that exits 0 after specified time has elapsed and don't want to run a cron job or even a while sleep 1 loop for a reminder (sleep isn't even a builtin...).

Interesting project. Unfortunate that its name conflicts with one of nq’s executables (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nq), but I’m not sure anything can be done about it.

nq

jq and miller[1] are essential parts of my toolbelt, right up there with awk and vim.

[1]: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

> This works really well if your problem can be solved in one or two liners.

My personal comfort threshold is around the 100-line mark. It's even possible to write maintainable shell scripts up to 500 lines, but it mostly depends on the problem you're trying to solve, and the discipline of the programmer to follow best practices (use sane defaults, ShellCheck, etc.).

> It go bad very quickly when, say, you have two CSV files and want to join them the sql-way.

In that case we're talking about structured data, and, yeah, Perl or Python would be easier to work with. That said, depending on the complexity of the CSV, you can still go a long way with plain Bash with IFS/read(1) or tr(1) to split CSV columns. This wouldn't be very robust, but there are tools that handle CSV specifically[1], which can be composed in a shell script just fine.

So it's always a balancing act of being productive quickly with a shell script, or reaching out for a programming language once the tools aren't a good fit, or maintenance becomes an issue.

[1]: https://miller.readthedocs.io/

where mlr is from https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

if this class of problems (i.e., csv/tsv data) is your main target you may find miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) much more useful in the long run

That said, you may be interested in Miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) which provides similar capabilities for CSV, JSON, and XML files. It doesn't use a SQL grammar, but that's just the proverbial lipstick on the thing. I'm not the author, but I have used it and I see some parallels in use cases at the very least.

worth giving Miller a shot

CSV utilities (still haven't pick a favorite one...): https://github.com/harelba/q https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit https://github.com/johnkerl/miller