Updates to line.rb – Open to more suggestions

I was chatting with a friend the other day and he had some really good ideas concerning last week’s line.rb script. He wants to make an improved version. I look forward to seeing what he will come up with because he shared some great ideas. Well, I couldn’t help but implement them immediately in my version. His ideas also spurred a little creativity from me and I came up with a few new features as well. The usage is now looks like:

  # Check Cmd Line Args and Print Usage if needed
  if ARGV.size <= 1
    puts "usage: line [options] filename numbers"
    puts
    puts " options:"
    puts "   --silent or -s   Just print the line, without [#]"
    puts
    puts " number formats:"
    puts "   1-3              Prints lines 1 through 3"
    puts "   5                Prints line 5"
    puts "   -1               Prints the last line, (negative)"
    puts
    puts " extra formats:"
    puts "   ~5               Prints 2 (default) lines before and after 5"
    puts "   4~10             Prints 4 lines before and after 10"
    puts "   *7 or 8*         Prints all lines before or after the number"
    puts "   5/1              Prints 5 lines, then skips 1 line..."
    puts "   2:5/1            Starts at line 2, prints and skips..."
    puts
    exit 1

So there is some cool new syntax:

• ~# – prints 2 lines before and after the given line number

• #~# – prints the given number of lines before and after the given line number

• *# – prints all of the lines before the given line number

• #* – prints all of the lines after the given line number

• #/# – is a print and skip option

• #:#/# – allows you to provide an offset

Lets say you want to print every even line in a text file. With this script that is not a problem. The solution is: starting on the 2nd line, print 1 line, then skip 1 line. (line file 2:1/1):

I think these new formats are pretty neat. You can always access the latest version of the script on Github or in my ~/bin. I’m willing to change the syntax and introduce new concepts. Send suggestions my way by dropping a comment! Cheers.

Quickly Output Lines in a File

The other day I wanted a shell command to have somebody print out the 671st line of /etc/services on their computer. So I gave it some thought, then some more thought, scratched my head, and figured out that I couldn’t really think of a shell command that does that. A google search came up with a few `sed` and `awk` examples but I honestly found those to be a bit awkward for something that should be super simple. So I wrote my own script.

After writing the script to print out a single line, I soon found it made a lot of sense to include ranges. Taking advantage of Ruby I can even print lines from the end with negative numbers. So I spent a few minutes to clean up the script and make it a little more reusable, add some formatting, and cleaner. Here was the result:

line is now the latest addition to my ~/bin.

Also, in case you wanted to use this in a shell script or via piping, there is a `–silent` or `-s` switch that you can use that removes all of the special formatting, and prints only the specified lines. Much nice for scripts. (See the highlighted line in the image below). Enjoy!

So what exactly is line 671 of /etc/services? On my mac it is: