If you want to do something, make it easy to do.
Applying this principle has allowed me to increase my productivity over time while protecting me from drudgery. Since I spend a lot of time in terminals, a simple example of this is defining appropriate aliases for commands I use a lot, so I don't need to type so much. Sometimes though, an alias doesn't cut it, and I need to write a small script.
Historically, I would cd into a directory on my path, open up a file, write the shebang line, write the script, save it, make it executable, test it, and go back to whatever I was doing. However, since I was always doing those same steps, it made sense to write a script to help me write scripts faster. Here it is :
BIN_PATH="$HOME/bin/"
SCRIPT_NAME="$1"
SCRIPT_PATH="$BIN_PATH$SCRIPT_NAME"
if [ ! -s "$SCRIPT_PATH" ]; then
echo "#!/bin/bash
" > "$SCRIPT_PATH"
chmod u+x "$SCRIPT_PATH"
fi
vim "+${2-2}" "$SCRIPT_PATH"
I call it scr
, as in script
. Say I want to write a new script called foo. All I have to do is type scr foo
in a terminal, write the body of the script, save, and I'm done. The next time I want to edit the script, I once again type scr foo
, do whatever changes I need to do, save, and I'm done. Since this significantly decreases the effort needed to write scripts, it has allowed me to write more scripts to take care of a variety of tasks I perform often.
I hope this small script, or even the philosophy that inspired it, can be of some use to you.
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