shopt causes bash completion to stop working.

Couple of days, I added some scripts to my bash startup and suddenly realized that bash completions stopped working. This is tricky situation in bash to figure out what went wrong. So, I set my foot down to make sure that I find out the culprit. Thus I started with method of elimination. So, I started with nothing in .bashrc and kept adding my stuff in batches, until the said feature was broken. Once that happened I started removing the added ones, one by one, until my completion started working again.

First earning on the blog in the form of advertising

Thanks to all my visitors, I was approached by some advitisers, which suited very well with the theme and philosophy of my blog and thus accepted the same. So, thanks to all my visitors, now my blog has earned its first income in the form of advertising.

Find all the missing paths in the PATH variable in bash script

Here is a simple script that will list out all the paths in the PATH variable that do not exist.

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      #!/bin/bash -<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> #<br /> #          FILE:  wrong_path.sh<br /> #<br /> #         USAGE:  ./wrong_path.sh<br /> #<br /> #   DESCRIPTION:  Show Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist<br /> #<br /> #       OPTIONS:  ---<br /> #  REQUIREMENTS:  ---<br /> #          BUGS:  ---<br /> #         NOTES:  ---<br /> #        AUTHOR:  Amit Agarwal (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in<br /> #       COMPANY:  Individual<br /> #       VERSION:  1.0<br /> #       CREATED:  09/20/2009 09:15:48 AM IST<br /> #      REVISION:  ---<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> <br /> set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error<br /> <br /> (IFS=:;for p in $PATH; do test -d $p || echo $p; done)
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Linux humour – tar is coward

Some errors are too good and though you would have seen them couple of times you don’t realize until sometimes it just hits you, like the one below:

tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

Related articles

• Tar Tricks on Linux (descentintodarkness.wordpress.com)

bash 4.0 – new feature mapfile

Recently I encountered a problem where I had to create couple of arrays in bash and these were quite dynamic in nature. This script was supposed to be used by couple of guys whom I did not trust too much in opening the script and modifyikng the array. So, the solution was to put these in different files and then put them in array using bash script itself. This is when I went through the bash man page again and found an interesting new inbuilt mapfile

perl is faster than bash in some cases.

Some days back, I had to generate some data to be uploaded to a database. As usual I assumed that bash should be faster and hence wrote the script to create the files in bash. But I found that even after 5 hours I was only 10% done with the data generation. Now that would mean that it would take around 50 hours to complete the data generation. Something did not look correct to me and I asked one of my colleague. He suggested I do a strace.

New feature in Nautilus – resize icon on desktop.

On Desktop on Gnome using nautilus, now you can resize individual icons. Just right click on the icon to resize and in the menu you will get a resize icon :

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and then you can resize the icon from the borders:

[][2]

Related articles

• “Where is this icon?” Nautilus script is incredibly nifty (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Use Nautilus’ Emblems feature to keep your home folder organised (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Screenshots: Desktop Unity in Natty (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Add a quick-access shortcuts to the GNOME right-click menu (ghacks.net)