Experimenting with Shell Scripts

2021-05-22

Recently I have been experimenting with new ways to document the stuff I write and although I'm hesitant to say it's the best, I have the most hope for Jekyll so far as it's been the most straightforward route for me to set up something easy to record my processes.

I would try to write something unique on this topic, but truthfully this article has everything you really need and some more. The only thing I will mention about my experience with setting up Jekyll is that I have had to run bundle add webrick, which is just another gem (think library in other programming languages) that would ensure our environment will deploy correctly.

The real fun thing I wanted to leave here was a shell script I have been experimenting with to help me out a little bit. I am no stranger to running shell scripts (it's one of the things about Linux I really enjoy, all of the setup is so satisfying when it goes smoothly), but now it was time for me to start automating to improve my experience.

I'll paste everything below, but I'll try and explain line by line what's going on.

#!/bin/zsh

title=$1
date=`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`
fname="$date-$title.md"

echo "---
type: post
title: $title
date: $date
---
" > $fname

nvim $fname

I should preface this by saying that although it's not a whole lot, really all of 5 commands, I wanted to share this because I find it fascinating that I can encapsulate a 30-second thinking process in 5 lines, solving the problem (hopefully forever).

title=$1 This line involves the command line arguments! This essentially makes it so that if I ran sh new.sh pog, title would be equivalent to pog. The reason we are using the 1 index instead of the 0th index is because the 0th index is the name of the shell script (here it is new.sh).

date=`date +'%Y-%m-%d'` Similar to before, all we are really doing in this line is storing a variable, but this one has a little bit of flavor. This command really gets its power from the date command. If you want to experiment in shell, you can start by seeing the progression of these commands

echo "hello world!";
echo "$(date)";
echo "`(date +'%Y')`";
echo "`(date +'%Y-%m-%d')`";

should output something like

hello world!
Sat May 22 06:40:55 UTC 2021
2021
2021-05-22

echo is just the equivalent of a print statement for the terminal, but what I want to stress here are the last two commands. We can see from the second command that this date command gives us all the information needed in order to format a jekyll post, but you can also specifically pick out the information that jekyll needs for a post with the % specifics.

fname="$date-$title.md" This is the final variable being set, to be honest I really just assigned this because I was bored and didn't want to rewrite the quotation marks, date, and title again later on.

echo "---
type: post
title: $title
date: $date
---
" > $fname

Truthfully, I think you have all the information to see this one works, just know that the > operator just means that instead of printing to the terminal, that infomation is stored in the filename (which was defined above). Feel free to experiment on the shell available if you're interested.

nvim $fname Now it's time to write! I just have the shell open up a neovim window for me to start writing up an article.

This might have been a little bit extra for so small of a shell script, but this was a cute thing I wrote up that I just felt like sharing. This is a blog after all :)