Playing with code found on Perlmonks

[oko1]

When I answer questions here, I often want to see exactly what kind of errors the posted code is going to throw - so I copy it, open a file in 'vi', paste it in, and (following a careful look at it to make sure that it's not going to do anything nasty to me) run it. The additional bits - e.g., adding on a Perl shebang and running 'chmod +x' on the file - are already shortcuts in my 'vi', but I thought that it would be nice to automate this part, at least. I've got "pmedit" linked to an icon on my Gnome toolbar, so all I have to do now is select the code and click the icon. The displayed file will already contain the code that I highlighted.

The following is a Bourne shell script, and requires 'Xdialog'. Please feel free to modify for other OSes and situations. Constructive comments are highly welcomed. :)

#!/bin/sh
# Created by Ben Okopnik on Sun Apr 13 11:22:45 EDT 2008

cd /tmp
label="New filename:"
while :
do
    fname=`Xdialog --stdout --inputbox "$label" 7 40`
    # Weird: '-f' doesn't handle '~', so we'll do it by hand
    fname=`echo $fname|sed 's/~/\/home\/ben/g'`

    if [ -f "$fname" ]
    then
        label="\"$fname\" already exists. New name:"
    else
        [ "$fname" = "" ] && exit
        xclip -o > "$fname"
        xterm -e vi "$fname"
        break
    fi
done

[ysth]

I'm surprised Xdialog doesn't have a specific direct filename mode. I installed it to try it out, and (for me, anyway) it dragged in gtk 1.2 libraries, so I poked around for a gtk 2.0 equivalent and found zenity, which has handy "--file-selection --save" options.

[oko1]

That's really odd - I thought (based on what it looks like) that 'Xdialog' was one of the old guard; the Athena Toolkit or something like that. Bleh. :(

On the other hand, modifying it to use none of those libraries, at least for the dialog end, is trivial: change 'Xdialog' to 'dialog', remove the 'xterm -e' line from the 'vi' invocation, and launch the whole script as 'xterm -e pmedit'.

[skx]

This could be rewritten:

    fname=`echo $fname|sed 's/~/\/home\/ben/g'`

Perhaps:

    fname=`echo $fname|perl -pe "s#~#$HOME#g"`

[oko1]

Oh - I hadn't realized we were golfing. In Unix, as in Perl, TMTOWTDI.

# Bourne shell and derivatives
fname=`eval echo $fname`
# Modern shells (e.g., Bash)
fname=${fname/\~/$HOME}

Your turn, m'sieu? :)