Introduction Some of using computers is inevitably repetitive: checking for updates, backing up files, maybe clearing some logs. Scripts are a great way to automate some of the logic around these tasks, but you have to remember to run them or they...

Introduction Most simple iterative programming tasks can be rephrased in terms of a 'map' or 'reduce' operation. The advantage here is that if we can work our problem into a map - reduce problem, we can easily increase parallelism. A simple example...

Summary We can use declare, eval and text manipulation tools like awk and sed to dynamically redefine shell functions based on their content or name. This allows us to add lines or generate entirely new functions. Introduction Bash and other shell...

Summary AutoCLI simplifies managing scripts by auto generating option menus, all in bash, without any dependencies. Sub menus, customization, and positional arguments are all supported. See autocli.sh on GitHub for the source and more examples. The...

Introduction Coprocesses expose a way to run a subshell asychronously, while maintaining full communication through pipes. In a typical script, you can run commands in the background (asychronously) with the & operator. This allows tasks to be worked...

Introduction Hal is a artificial intelligence I wrote for the Minecraft server I run. Here I hope to shed some light onto what he does and how he works. I'm going to run with the anthropomorphized 'he' even though Hal is really just a bunch of shell...