Tag: bash

Adding defensive sanity checks

I recently needed to make a set of several favicons, so I went to the web to see if anyone had a script I could borrow steal.

Sure enough, I found one written by Joshua McGee: “Create a favicon with ImageMagick” (not reproduced here for copyright reasons).

It was a simple enough script, just a series of escaped commands. I noticed, however, that it assumed a few things:

  • An image file was specified on the command line,
  • The image existed, and
  • Imagemagik was installed.

In other words, the script was not developed defensively. This makes sense: it was just a bang-out.

The script had no inline documentation, and if a favicon file that already existed in the current directory would be silently overwritten—not good.

I’m clumsy: I delete and overwrite files all the time, so I could use a little help. Maybe I can tidy up the script? (more…)

Bulk process RAW image files

Recently I had to convert about 250 RAW image files to PNGs. For neatness, I wanted to convert the upper-case filenames the camera assigned with a lower-case name.

A little bash script-fu is all it took:

clean_pics.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Extract from SD Card
for i in /Volumes/SDCARD/DCIM/100ND40X/DSC_0*; do
 filename=$(basename "$i")
 lower_file="$(echo $filename | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')"
 # verify it doesn't already exist
 newfile="${lower_file%.*}.png"
 echo -e "Processingnt$i tont$newfile"
 if [[ -e $newfile ]]; then
  echo "****SKIPPING"
 else
  convert "$i" "$newfile"
 fi
done

echo -e "Detoxing..."
find . -iname "*.png" -exec detox "{}" ;

echo "Procedure complete."

(“SDCARD”, etc is the path to the source files)

Once the script was up and running, it took about 1/2 hour to process all the files. Meanwhile, I was off doing something else!

How to prevent duplicate directories in your path

Forest PathWhat happens with the Path

The path is set via a myriad of config files. It is very easy to accidentally add the same directory to the path, and there is no built-in mechanism from preventing this situation.

While it has no impact on performance, it does make reading the path more difficult (for example, when trying to see if a particular directory is in the path).

Easy Fix

When you find your path cluttered up with duplicate directories, it is relatively easy to correct this. Simply use pathmunge to add directories instead of the typical

export PATH=/fizz/buzz:$PATH

Procedure

First, edit your /etc/bashrc (or equivalent) and add the following function:

pathmunge () {
  if ! [[ $PATH =~ (^|:)$1($|:) ]] ; then
    if [ "$2" = "after" ] ; then
      PATH=$PATH:$1
    else
      PATH=$1:$PATH
    fi
  fi
}

Now you can call this function in your ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, or wherever you need to add a directory to the path. There are two ways to do this.

Insert at the beginning of the path

Using

pathmunge /path/to/dir

is the functional equivalent of

export PATH=/path/to/dir:$PATH

Append to the end of the path

pathmunge /path/to/dir after

is the functional equivalent of

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/dir

In either case, the directory won’t be added if it already is in the path, preventing duplicates.

Technique credit: Sam Halicke and Christopher Cashell at Serverfault.

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