HPR3625: Shell Tips and Snippets - Collaborative Effort

Carl talks about a method to move function definitions to the bottom of a script using sed:

#!/bin/sh
source <(sed '1,/^exit/ d' $0)

__say "hello"

exit

__say()
{
    echo $1
}

Guest Host #1 (scroll to the bottom to ruin the surprise) talks about the shift command using this example:

startdate="$1" # Pick up date
shift
days=0

# Loop through args and create events
while [ $1 ] ; do # as many times as you add a timestamp
        [ $1 != "off" ] && khal new $(date -j -v+"$days"d -f %Y-%m-%d +%Y-%m-%d $startdate) $1 8H Work
        let days++
        shift
done

Guest Host #2 provides tips and examples on how to use variables safely and politely provide default values. One example of assigning a default value is:

foo=${foo:-"blah"}

Carl then closes out with the : (colon) shell builtin and provides a variation on the above default value:

: ${foo:="blah"}

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