Bash script

6 Articles

Preview Markdown In The Terminal With Bash

June 17, 2024 by 12 Comments

Markdown has become an extremely popular way to document source code and other projects, thanks in no small part to how well web-based services like GitHub render it. Just sprinkle a few extra characters into a regular text file, and all of a sudden it looks like you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, there are some places where markdown won’t actually render, and you’ll be stuck looking at those extra characters.

But thanks to MarCLIdown, the terminal doesn’t have to be one of those places. Written by [NihaAlGhul], this simple tool takes a given markdown file and spits out a fairly impressive rendering — and you don’t even need to have one of those fancy new GPU-accelerated terminals. Most impressively, the whole thing is implemented as a single Bash script.

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Amber Compiles To Bash

May 22, 2024 by 17 Comments

It certainly isn’t a new idea to compile a language into an intermediate language. The original C++ compiler outputs C code, for example. Enhanced versions of Fortran were often just conversions of new syntax to old syntax. Of course, it makes sense to output to some language that can run on lots of different platforms. So, using that logic, Amber makes perfect sense. It targets — no kidding — bash. You write with nice modern syntax and compile-time checks. The output is a bash script. Admittedly, sometimes a hard-to-read bash script, but still.

If you want to see the source code, it is available on GitHub. Since Windows doesn’t really support bash — if you don’t count things like Cygwin and WSL — Amber only officially supports Linux and MacOS. In addition to compiling files, Amber can also execute scripts directly which can be useful for a quick one-liner. If you use Visual Studio Code, you can find a syntax highlighter extension for Amber.

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Suc Aims To Replace Slack In Five Lines Of Bash

July 10, 2023 by 43 Comments

The design philosophy of Unix is fairly straightforward. Software should do one thing as simply as possible, and do that one thing only. As a design principle this is sound advice even well outside of the realm of Unix, and indeed software in general, but that doesn’t stop modern software packages from being too large for their own good. So, if you’re tired of bloated chat programs like Slack or Mattermost with their millions of lines of code, you might instead favor something like Simple Unix Chat (suc).

The idea is that suc can perform almost all modern chat functions in only five lines of Bash, supporting rich-text chat, file sharing, access control, and encryption. These five lines, though, only perform the core function of suc — which is to write text to a file on the system. Indeed, suc makes liberal use of plenty of other Unix services which do not add to the line counts, such as the use of SSH to handle authentication. It also relies on some other common Unix system features to handle things like ownership and access for the text files that host the text for the chat.