What is the most useful script you've written for everyday life? [closed]

Answer 1

I don't have the code any more, but possibly the most useful script I wrote was, believe it or not, in VBA. I had an annoying colleague who had such a short fuse that I referred to him as Cherry Bomb. He would often get mad when customers would call and then stand up and start ranting at me over the cubicle wall, killing my productivity and morale.

I always had Microsoft Excel open. When he would do this, I would alt-tab to Excel and there, on the toolbar, was a new icon with an image of a cherry bomb. I would discreetly click that ... and nothing would happen.

However, shortly after that I would get a phone call and would say something like "yeah, yeah, that sounds bad. I had better take a look." And then I would get up, apologize to the Cherry Bomb and walk away.

What happened is that we used NetWare and it had a primitive messaging system built in. When I clicked the button, a small VBA script would send out a NetWare message to my friends, telling them that the Cherry Bomb was at it again and would they please call me. He never figured it out :)

Answer 2

alias dir='ls -al' is my preferred favorite script.

Answer 3

I use this as an autoloaded function. I can just type "mycd" and a list of directories appears which I frequently cd to. If I happen to know then number I can just say something like "mycd 2". To add a directory to the list you just type "mycd /tmp/foo/somedirectory".

function mycd {

MYCD=/tmp/mycd.txt
touch ${MYCD}

typeset -i x
typeset -i ITEM_NO
typeset -i i
x=0

if [[ -n "${1}" ]]; then
   if [[ -d "${1}" ]]; then
      print "${1}" >> ${MYCD}
      sort -u ${MYCD} > ${MYCD}.tmp
      mv ${MYCD}.tmp ${MYCD}
      FOLDER=${1}
   else
      i=${1}
      FOLDER=$(sed -n "${i}p" ${MYCD})
   fi
fi

if [[ -z "${1}" ]]; then
   print ""
   cat ${MYCD} | while read f; do
      x=$(expr ${x} + 1)
      print "${x}. ${f}"
   done
   print "\nSelect #"
   read ITEM_NO
   FOLDER=$(sed -n "${ITEM_NO}p" ${MYCD})
fi

if [[ -d "${FOLDER}" ]]; then
   cd ${FOLDER}
fi

}

Answer 4

A perl script that scrapes my local Craigslist, by selected categories, in to a SQL DB which I can then query against.

V2 of this updates the DB with a timer and alerts me if I have a match on any of the queries, basically providing me with a background agent for CL.

Answer 5

A small application that left click (or double-click) every "X" ms for "Y" amount of time. No more need for that drinking bird to work at the nuclear power plant! ;)

Answer 6

A bash script called up so that if I'm in /a/very/deeply/nested/path/somewhere and I want to go "up" N directories, I can type up N:

#!/bin/bash
LIMIT=$1
P=$PWD
for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT; i++))
do
    P=$P/..
done
cd $P

For example:

/a/very/deeply/nested/path/somewhere> up 4
/a/very> 

NB by gmatt:

Working off the great work above, it can be extended to a back function by placing the following into your bashrc:

function up( )
{
LIMIT=$1
P=$PWD
for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT; i++))
do
    P=$P/..
done
cd $P
export MPWD=$P
}

function back( )
{
LIMIT=$1
P=$MPWD
for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT; i++))
do
    P=${P%/..}
done
cd $P
export MPWD=$P
}