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Software Engineer | Technical Writer
Bread and butter from React and Rails, but currently exploring Linux System Administration and Cloud Solutions/DevOps.
Learning everyday. Follow along with my series on creating Chrome Extensions, Desktop Apps (soon), and PWAs.
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I learned today that my main blog posts should be called "Today I Learned"s. I'm surprised my last post was over two months ago. I've been working on my new Chrome extension project, Chorus, making features, fixing problems, and getting it ready for ...
TLDR: Fix a bug, package and upload to Developer Dashboard, fill forms, submit for review, and look at analytics after going live. In this post, we want to create and submit an initial release for the Chrome Web Store and upload it to Github. Before ...
Here's a recap of what we want to accomplish for the first feature: Either disable or remove all the Add to queue UI (on hover and via the dropdown: Enable or disable the first feature by clicking on the extension in the toolbar, which controls t...
Building a Youtube Add-on to Regain Control of Queue Playlist
TLDR: This article demonstrates how to use AppleScript to control Spotify and display song information in a tmux status bar. Tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables several terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. T...
cat (i.e concatenate and print files)
I have used cat and most likely you have too, although my usage has mostly been limited to viewing files in the terminal, such as taking a glance at packages listed in a package.json or reading a .env file. The command has a lot of options, such as numbering lines, removing empty lines, etc. Take a look at some of them below and use the man pages to further explore.
The special case which inspired this post is in the DESCRIPTION above:
The cat utility reads files sequentially,
writing them to the standard output. The file operands are processed in command-line order. If file is a single dash (‘-’) or absent,cat reads from the standard input.
cat can also read from standard input (STDIN), i.e keyboard input in our terminal. This means that it will regurgitate any input we enter back to the console if we don't supply a file to it from which to read.
Where's the editor part then? Well, instead of having cat writing out input to STDOUT (console), we can redirect the output to a file.
A small caveat is that "editor" is somewhat of a misnomer here as while the program is running you do not have functionalities like editing or going back to a previous line, syntax highlighting, etc. This is sufficient enough in cases like above where one is maybe writing or appending to a todo-list, .gitignore, .env, etc. I have found this to be slightly more efficient than using vim to open/create, insert, save, and exit, or using echo with multi-line text requiring enclosing strings.
I am going to be using this for a while and see if it sticks for the use cases above or any new one I discover.