Daniel Perelman
The problem# In a shell script, I wanted to use inotifywait's --monitor option to watch for changes to files, but I didn't care how many changes had been made, only whether or not changes had been made. I wanted to use --monitor as if more changes where made later, I still wanted to get notified...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# For a compile-on-save workflow where some computation is done in response to every change to a file, if there may sometimes be many changes close together, it may be wasteful to respond to all of them. This is often handled by debouncing the events: instead of responding to every...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# Last time, I presented a script read_keypress.sh which would read any single keypress in a shell script. For printable characters, it's straightforward what this means, but for keys like left arrow (🠈), it's not obvious how to deal with them. The solution# keytest.sh demonstrates...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# For certain applications it can be useful to get many quick responses from the computer, so we would like it to react to individual keypresses instead of requiring an entire command to be typed out and confirmed by pressing Enter. While this is a common feature of GUI and TUI toolkits...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# When doing an incremental backup, any moved file on the source filesystem usually results in recopying the file to the destination filesystem. For a large file this can both be slow and possibly waste space if the destination keeps around deleted files (e.g. ZFS holding on to old...