Month: February 2018

Flow control in bash

Flow control in bash

It seems like whenever I want to write an if-then or case statement in bash, I spent an hour searching the web and end up finding 12 different suggested ways of doing it. I try them all and maybe one of them works if I’m lucky.

I happened to find what I think is a really great reference for this that has been a great resource for me:

Bash Scripting Tutorial – 5. If Statements

Things like string comparisons, inspecting files, boolean operations, and nested flow control are some of the topics covered. Sure, there is the official bash documentation mentions this stuff, but it’s very terse and doesn’t provide good examples, if at all.

Having said all this, I highly recommend writing command-line tools in Swift:

Creating command-line tool in Swift

Not only will you be increasing your knowledge of Swift, it’s much more powerful, more easily debuggable, …

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Moderately advanced searching in Mail

Moderately advanced searching in Mail

Mail offers some moderately powerful searching but it’s not always super obvious. Here are a few really simple things you can do:

Put a search term in quotes (“the owls are not what they seem”) to search for a phrase. Group two tokens to do a simple AND (must be capitalized) search, like this:

Some more intermediate things you can do:

Use AND/OR with parentheses to construct a more complex query:

(macOS AND watchOS) OR Tennis

Eliminate a search term but using AND NOT (or a minus sign).

(macOS AND watchOS) -tvOS

Smart mailboxes

A clever but not heavily used way to hone searches is to create smart mailboxes that match criteria that you often search for as part of a more complex search. For example, let say you often search for various terms in messages only written by yourself. If you create a smart mailbox of messages from yourself, …

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