sysbox VS shpotify

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.

Shpotify is a shell script that allows you to control Spotify from the command line: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify

The first version of it I wrote in a couple of hours.

And then it went on to be quite popular and has lived a life of its own.

This is only peripherally related, but if you were using libspotify to work on a a command line client, I have an alternative approach. Shpotify offers command line control of the Spotify app on Macs: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify

I was expecting it to work like Spotify terminal control shpotify

A long time ago, before Spotify had support for multiple devices where one could act as a remote and control the other, I wrote a tool called Shpotify: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify . It is a simple Bash/AppleScript.

The primary usecase for me was to SSH tunnel into a media centre Mac in my living room and control music on Spotify. I released it on GitHub and it has grown a lot in popularity amongst people who like to do a lot of their computing in the shell.

Was searching on how to enable global spotify hotkey, came across this script, check the readme for install instructions. But you can only use it via terminal commands.