prettycrontab VS sysbox

A bunch of shell scripts I've written over the years are available from https://git.marcofontani.it/mfontani/scripts

Very useful ones:

- evenodd, to colorize the background of lines of text so it's easier to see which start of text corresponds to which end of text

- time-rollup, to time the time it takes to run a given command and provide percentage-based statistics on the execution

- a wrapper around "jq" to make it DWIM w/regards to gzipped, bzipped, and zstd-compressed files

I've also put some full-fledged binaries on github:

- https://github.com/mfontani/prettycrontab which is a crontab pretty-printer which parses a possibly specially commented crontab to give you an overview of what's coming up next

- https://github.com/mfontani/tstdin to timestamp your stdin, and provide when the line was received, how long it was since the start of the command, and how long it was since the last line was received. Useful to add at the end of a pipe to both log and perform analysis on the output and time it took to do stuff

- https://github.com/mfontani/rofixec to "sorta template" a rofi (a X11 runner) runner so it picks commands from a given list (provided as yaml or json configuration) and executes the picked item in a background job

- https://github.com/mfontani/git-recent which helps you pick the most recent branches you've worked on, very useful when paired with fzf for picking

- https://github.com/mfontani/los-opinionated-git-tools instead contains a ton of useful little git-related scripts, from one which DWIMs the master/main/blead branch name to one which helps you reauthor the last commit, to one (git-rr) which helps you perform a git rebase with context info about the commits you're rebasing: which files they touched, etc - to make it easier to fixup together commits which touched the same file... which is an operation I do so often I've created a "git-fixup" script, which automates fixing up the currently committed file to the last commit which touched that file in the branch

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.