Practising in the shell helps me improve and exposes me to new knowledge. Here's an example.

At the end of the working day I'm tired, but there's often just enough energy left in my brain to explore new options for some Unix commands, and practise my shell fu. Here's a few trivial things that I just learned, by writing a pipeline to choose and display a new theme for my current terminal of choice, kitty.

There's a nice selection of themes for kitty; I've installed the contents of the repo in the right place and can select a theme by adding an include at the bottom of my kitty.conf file:

include ./theme.conf

and then creating theme.conf as a symbolic link pointing to the actual theme configuration file (from the repo) that I want to use:

lrwxr-xr-x   1 i347491  staff     72 13 Sep 18:07 theme.conf -> kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf

This was achieved with the following:

cd $DOTFILES/config/kitty/ \
  && find kitty-themes/themes -name '*.conf' \
    | shuf -n 1 \
    | xargs -J % ln -fsv % theme.conf \
    | grep -P -o '\w+(?=\.conf$)'

This uses find to look for conf files in the kitty-themes/themes/ directory within my dotfiles configuration for kitty. The output of such a find command looks like this:

kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray_Eighties_Dull.conf
kitty-themes/themes/Monokai.conf
kitty-themes/themes/Floraverse.conf
...

I pass this list to shuf (short for "shuffle"), which "generates random permutations" and ask it via -n 1 to only give me one back.

Then of course it would be nice to use xargs to pass that single, random theme file name, for example kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf, to the ln command to create a symbolic link. The thing is, xargs puts what it's given at the end of the list; in other words, if we did this:

echo kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf | xargs ln -fsv theme.conf

then the ln command invoked would be the wrong way round, i.e.:

ln -fsv theme.conf kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf

instead of

ln -fsv kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf theme.conf

Luckily xargs has the -J option which allows us to specify a pattern, and then refer to that pattern to insert the value appropriately, which is what is happening here - the % is the pattern and shows where in the ln command the value should be put:

xargs -J % ln -fsv % theme.conf

What of the ln command itself? Well there's the -s option which is the main deal, i.e. we want to create a symbolic link. The -f option tells ln to not worry about any existing file (i.e. if there's already a theme.conf) and to just overwrite it. And the -v is a verbose option which outputs what is being done.

This last -v option is used so that I can get the name of the randomly selected theme. Without the last part of the pipeline, into grep, we'd see something like this, output because of this -v option to ln:

theme.conf -> kitty-themes/themes/SpaceGray.conf

So we can then pipe this into grep to grab the SpaceGray part, invoking the powerful Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) class of regular expressions (for which I have to use the -P option) to be able to use a positive lookahead assertion (?=\.conf$) to say what we're trying to match, \w+ (a sequence of at least one word character), must be directly followed by .conf up against the end of the line ($).

Such an assertion is not part of the actual match, which means we can then simply use the -o option to tell grep to output just the match itself, i.e.:

SpaceGray

I use this technique in getbtpcli (see line 61) - if you're interested in reading more about this, have a look at the blog post SAP Tech Bytes: btp CLI - installation, and the comments too.

And that's pretty much it. Nothing earth shattering, but certainly a couple of things that I found out (in particular ln's -v option and xargs's -J option.

Happy learning!