scripts

= scripts

This is Ian Darwin's collection of 500 *Nix scripts, some utterly trivial (could be aliases instead of scripts), some much more complex, in continuous use and development since 1984. I know the earliest repo date is 1994, but hey, CVS didn't even exist when I started, let alone this new-fangled stuff like git (which came along two full decades into the project).

When I started it was Bourne shell all the way. Ksh and Bash came later; both are largely upwards-compatible from Bourne, so older scripts will still run.

Most of the scripts should run on any modern POSIX/Unix/Linux system, but some will not. While the early work was done on PDP-11 and VAX-32 Unix, Solaris, and other systems including Linux, almost all the recent work has been on OpenBSD and Mac OS X. Also, some of them depend on having installed certain Java programs (some of which can be found in my other repos). Some of those install in your Maven repo (~/.m2/repository) while others install in ~/lib or even elsewhere. So if one of them doesn't work for you, bear in mind that there are lots of variations out there.

Also, note in the shebang line ("#!"), most for the shell, some that invoke various non-shell interpreters. If the shebang is of the form "#!/usr/bin/env PROGRAM" then this is a way of working around the fact that different *Nixes (even different distros of the same branch like Linux) install binaries in different directory locations; this construct will find the interpreter as long as it's in your PATH variable. And as long as some bright light hasn't changed the location of the "env" command, which is in /usr/bin on every sane user-oriented Unix-like system in existence.

== Guided Tour

A list of some of the more interesting scripts appears in index.html, which has links generated assuming you will view it from the same folder where the scripts are located. To view it you will have to download the repository and open the file index.html in a browser. That file is itself generated by one of the scripts here.

== Provenance and Updates

If you obtained this collection as a tar or zip file, you will probably not be able to get updates, which appear in the master repo at completely random intervals. You should instead:

• Install git, if it's not already on your system;
• git clone https://github.com/IanDarwin/scripts.git - this will create a scripts
  folder, and populate it, in a way that you can do git pull ever few months and get updates.

== Caveats

Some of the scripts are well documented, some have almost no documentation. No claim is made that anything here is product-ready in a commercial sense.

USE AT OWN RISK.

See also: https://github.com/IanDarwin/obscripts[ObScripts], a smaller package of scripts that are specific to https://openbsd.org[OpenBSD], my favorite (and recommended) *Nix flavor.