Normally I'm a mac person, but at my new job I'm finding myself using a PC. I often have to open html files and for every href link insert a target blank argument. Rather then do this manually I was wondering if there was a script that I could use to automate the process. Say:
search for href
find the second double quotation after the href string
insert the string "target = _blank"
Mind you I have never used a shell script on a PC in my life, so much explanation might be needed here.
Thanks,
I use Groovy for those kind of tasks. Good thing with Groovy (as well as with other famous scripting languages), someone might have already done the task you want to accomplish. In your case, I found this article. It demonstrates a similar case you mentioned (Search and Replace).
I don't believe the windows shell is very powerful, so even if it is possible to achieve I can't imagine it'll be easy. I would strongly advise using a real scripting language such as Python or Perl, or bash if that's what you're familiar with. You can install pretty much all of them on Windows (see links).
I presume you can solve the problem from there, as your major concern seemed to be with Windows.
Just get a copy of sed for win32 (perhaps form here) and do it the usual sed way.
Related
For someone who has been using bash for years, what's the quickest way to get productive with Microsoft's PowerShell? I've noticed my old friends ls and ps work, but sadly grep didn't. I could just man up and read through the piles of documentation, but I'm guessing there is a quicker path to productivity for someone with a long history of bash usage.
I don't know if it matters or not, but the reason I'm looking to get acquainted is because it seems like there is finally a proper shell on Windows instead of needing to install cygwin, and I'd like to start using it exclusively instead of writing bat files for automated activities like builds and deployments and such.
I'm not sure your Bash history is going to help you much with PowerShell. It is quite a bit different since the idea is to pipeline rich .NET objects as opposed to text or byte streams. For a leg up, check out my Effective PowerShell free eBook. It is about 60 pages but I think does a decent job of outlining the mental model you need to get the most out of PowerShell. For a full, free book check out Master PowerShell. At the point you think you're willing to part with some $$, Windows PowerShell in Action is the best book out there IMO.
Note: there are some "Unix" oriented aliases to get you by for a while (ls, ps, etc) but you'll run out of steam pretty quick because the parameters are quite different and as I said the pipeline is quite different than in Bash.
I would also recommended looking over some of the Q&A on PowerShell on StackOverflow especially for those questions that you think - "yeah, how would you do that in PowerShell". I think you would learn a good bit just doing that.
A quick Cheat sheet
I'd suggest just man up and read through the "piles" of documentation. It's actually not that difficult once you get the basics down. You'll need the knowledge anyway if you intend to do anything even remotely productive with PowerShell.
there GNU utilities such as your favourite grep that is ported to windows. see GNU packages
on the other hand, if you loathe the idea of downloading stuff, you can use vbscript. it comes natively installed.
We wish to provide people to be able to add some logic to their accounts(say, given a few arguments, how to compute a particular result). So, essentially, this would be tantamount to writing simple business rules with support for conditionals and expressions. However, the challenge is to provide them a simple online editor where they can create the logic (preferably) by completely visual means (drag/drop Expr-tree nodes maybe -- kinda like Y! pipes).
Does anybody know of a scripting/macro/domain-specific language that lets people do this? The challenge is the visual editor, since we don't wish to invest in developing the UI to do the editing. The basic requirements would be:
1. Embedded into another language, or run securely (no reboot -n or <JUNK-DANGEROUS-COMMAND> >> ~/.bashrc)
2. Easily accessible to users without coding background (no need of any advanced features)
3. Preferably have a simple GUI based editor to create the logic programs accessible to non-developers (kinda like spreadsheets)
4. Some ability to generate compile-time warnings (invalid code) would be good (Type safety?)
5. Ability to embed some data before execution which is available to the interpreter (Eg., name, birthday, amount)
Anybody tried doing something like this and got any ideas? I looked at Lua, Io, Python, Ruby and a host of others, but the challenge essentially is that I don't think non-programmers will be able to understand the code all that much. Something that could be added via "meta-programming" to say a Ruby would be good as well, if an editor could be easily developed!
As a matter fact, Microsoft is developing Oslo, which is right up your alley.
Chris Sells has been writing a lot about it recently.
It is designed to be a way to author DSLs and also to visually author these models with a graphical tool called Quadrant. Sounds very very similar to what you are looking for.
Open source wise, Ruby I think can be close, as you can see if you look at _whytheluckystiff's Try Ruby or Hackety.
I don't think you'll find anything that isn't too generic, especially regarding the GUI editor. There's no generic tools as far as I know that will be able to automatically interface with your program and be able to query data from it and interpret the script into commands in your software -- if there is I'd like to have a copy. Not being flippant, but you will have to do some (probably alot) of work to get this working. It will probably result in you writing a custom DSL.
I would take a look at PowerShell. You could surface all the activities a user would like to script in a very readable way.
There is some talk of using PowerShell to create a DSL on the PowerShell team blog and Bruce Payette, the technical lead, talks about this in his book Windows PowerShell in Action from Manning.
At the other end of the scale is to write something simple as a HyperText Application (HTA) -- assuming Windows of course -- along the lines of my Clive tool. The article on the blog doesn't mention the HTA version, but essentially I could enter VBScript-ish code into one textarea and interpret it on the spot, output going into another text area on the form.
With HTAs giving you all the form control of HTML, plus the DOM, you could come up with something interesting fairly quickly.
This is related somewhat to this question about a better shell terminal/gui-interface for cmd.exe
In my quest to find a better shell terminal, the only useful thing I came across was Console2, other alternatives weren't free and generally didn't offer much more than Console2 to make them worth their price.
I can't help but wonder, "how come"? The shell terminal is a very valuable tool to a programmer, yet no one came around to try and do a better job than cmd.exe (except for the guys # console2)??
Surely designing a command line shell terminal emulator can't be such a hard task!
Has anyone tried writing a shell terminal emulator before? What's in it? Any resources out there (say, if I want to program my own shell)?
UPDATE
17/07/2009
I rephrased the question, what I was referring to as a "shell" is actually called a terminal emulator (at least in the linux world). I only realized this recently so I thought I should revisit this question and fix it.
There are plenty of shells around for Windows, bash under Cygwin is the one I use the most, and it's certainly free. I have to be honest here, cmd.exe has come a long way since the batch file processor of MSDOS. It's actually quite powerful, but still not a pimple on the rear end of bash :-).
You should try to write a command line shell, it will be an education for you. It's not that hard to do the basics if all you want is a program launcher.
But, if you want all the power of a real shell, including a full blown programming language, job control, piping, output redirection and (seriously) too many other things to list, we probably won't be hearing from you for a while. Except when you pop up your head to ask us esoteric questions about how shells should do this or that.
What about PowerShell from Microsoft? AFAIK it's free, and gives you C# power right in the shell, and tons of other features. But, it DOES require the NET Framework...
I won't endorse it yet, as I haven't really used it, but it's on my list to do...
My bets are on Powershell for the future if you are a Windows guy.
PowerShell will be installed by default on Windows Server 08 R2 (WS08R2) and Windows 7 according to MS.
I have used Powershell myself and found it to be very useful, and if you are familiar with .NET then its all the more easier.
Download a two page reference document here, this is all you will need to get started.
I mean the gui-interface part that displays the text,
Ah! you mean what we call a "pseudo-tty" or a "terminal emulator" in unix. In windows, I guess it is called a "console host". I do not use windows, but I heard that console2 is very good.
Seems there are others:
http://www.powershellanalyzer.com/
http://powershellide.com/
http://www.codeplex.com/PoshConsole
and, of course, for real programmers, you have the shell mode of (x)emacs :-)
Erm... what about all the ports of Unix command shells to Windows?
Just go with cygwin and log on using PuTTY. So much better than the standard console. :)
Also, Python (or perl for that matter) can replace the shell entirely.
You might want to try Take Command Console, formerly 4NT, formerly 4DOS.
Quick summary of points you might care about:
Command line editing with filename completion, history, and cut & paste
Integrate PERL, Ruby, REXX, Python, and any Active Scripting language
Fast - 20-200% faster output display than the standard Windows console
Integrated file explorer - examine directories, drag and drop files
Upwardly compatible with CMD.EXE with literally thousands of additions
Not free (except trial version) and not open source. I haven't tried it myself, but I was a 4DOS junkie back in the day, before Cygwin.
If you need handy terminal - give a try to ConEmu (I'm the author). It is a Windows console window enhancement (local terminal emulator), which presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable tabbed GUI window with dozens of features.
Another answer and comments
Terminals and shells are very powerful but can be complicated to learn, especially to get the best out of them. Does anyone know of a more GUI based command shell that helps a user or displays answers in a more friendly way? I'm aware of IPython, but even the syntax of that is somewhat convoluted, although it's a step in the right direction.
Further to this, results could be presented graphically, e.g. wouldn't it be nice to be able to pipe file sizes into a pie chart?
Hotwire is an attempt to combine the power of the traditional command line interface with GUI elements. So it has a GUI side, and tries to be helpful in suggesting commands, and in showing you possible matches from your history. (While there are keyboard shortcuts to do this in bash and other shells, you have to know them ...)
You can use all your common system commands, but a number of key ones have new versions by default which use an object pipeline, and are displayed with a nice GUI view. In particular ls (aka dir) shows lists files and shows them in columns. You can sort by clicking on the column headers, double click on files to open, or double click on directories to move to that directory. The proc command allows you to right click on a process and one of the options is to kill it.
The object pipeline works in a similar way to Microsoft Powershell, allowing commands in the pipe to access object properties directly rather than having to do text processing to extract it.
Hotwire is cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac), though it is at an early stage of development. To learn more, install (click on the link for your platform) and work through the simple getting started page.
If you don't like hotwire, you could also look at the list of related projects and ideas maintained on the hotwire wiki.
fish is a Unix shell that focuses on user-friendliness, such as by providing colored highlighting and extensive tab completion.
For a different kind of blend of textual and graphical interface, there's Quicksilver, as well as similar/inspired tools like Launchy, GNOME Do and ENSO.
Is this for Python in particular, or are you just interested in any command shell that has a GUI interface?
If the idea of piping file sizes into a pie chart interests you, you might try PowerGUI, a GUI layer on Microsoft's PowerShell command shell. PowerShell also lets you pipe data from commands into XML, CSV, and other formats that are understood by GUI programs.
GUI-based command shell seems like an oxymoron to me.
Not really? A command shell is just an encapsulated environment in which to execute commands. Why can't they have GUI extensions? We are in the 21st century! :)
Check out http://hotwire-shell.org/
This is along the lines of what I was thinking. It's a shame it uses PyGTK, I'd have preferred PyQT (perhaps a licensing issue?). There look to be some interesting related links from the project as well.
If the idea of piping file sizes into a pie chart interests you, you might try PowerGUI, a GUI layer on [...]
PowerGUI looks like a hobby project I've been working on that organises regularly used tasks. It looks like it organises frequent jobs and formats the output for you. The formatting I see as the end result of the data flow. But it would be nice to be able to tinker with data and then continue to use it.
PowerShell as a command shell is very forgiving for new users and is easy to learn. There is an add-on product (it is a commercial product) called PowerGadgets that would let you pipe file sizes into a pie chart or other types of displays
PowerGadgets looks very interesting. It would be interesting to have things like system monitors so that you could say, read the CPU usage per second and pipe it into a graph.
Is this for Python in particular, or are you just interested in any command shell that has a GUI interface?
Any really, currently, but I like the idea of cross platform, easy to edit, no compiler setup. I use Windows at work and Windows/Linux (Ubuntu)/OSX at home. Python is just an easy solution, and for writing stuff like this is has a lot of libraries already.
Thanks for all the links. Keep them coming. :)
I'm not sure whether you're asking for a shell as in bash/csh, or a shell as in ipython. If it's the later, then I'd recommend looking at Reinteract. While it's still very alpha, it's already a great tool for rapid prototyping in python, and allows embedding of plots, widgets, etc.
GUI-based command shell seems like an oxymoron to me.
The key-word here is Graphical.
If I want a GUI, I want a full-featured GUI. But if I want raw performance, I want a command line.
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking for. You can either have a GUI or a command line. What do you need from a graphical command shell that you couldn't get from a straight GUI?
Also, if you want graphical information about file sizes there are a few applications that do that. One example is WinDirStat.
Also not related to Python, but Ubiquity (a firefox extension) is a graphical command-line-like tool for the web, with a similar spirit to Quicksilver/Launchy/GnomeDo.
I know that Automator in Mac OS X is not a shell but it is the best graphical tool I have ever used to do batch tasks. I think it is worth mentioning here as even I (self-titled as a power user) use it from time to time to rename files or other routines. Although these could be done in a few lines of shell script, the Automator's graphical interface makes me feel like I am not working and it just works.
Check out http://hotwire-shell.org/
PowerShell V2 is developing a graphical command shell, but I don't think that is what you are looking for.
PowerShell as a command shell is very forgiving for new users and is easy to learn. There is an add-on product (it is a commercial product) called PowerGadgets that would let you pipe file sizes into a pie chart or other types of displays. Information about that can be found here.
As for ease of use, PowerShell command follow a Verb-Noun pattern (along with aliases for ease of use from the command line) and is very discoverable. Check out some screencasts I did on using PowerShell at PowerShell Basics.
I found POSH, a GUI for MS PowerShell. This is pretty much what I intended. You have a command-line backend with a WPF GUI frontend. You can pipe results from command to the next and show graphical output.
Maxima provides a mathematical shell (screens) . It is nice that you type in a C-like syntax and receive graphically formatted output.
I have a bunch of files that I need to be able to transport and install quickly. My current method for doing so is moving a flash drive with a readme file of where stuff goes whenever I need to move stuff, which is rather inelegant and cumbersome.
My idea for a solution would be to write up a quick script to move files around that I could just click on. I've done some bash scripting before but batch scripting is a little odd to me. Does anyone have a good online reference guide I could use?
An alternative soulution I could accept would be a program that makes an installer for you, though I'm a bit against that as I would lose a lot of control. However, I'd be alright with it if it was extremely simple,
Sounds like robocopy tool is exactly what you need.
Very powerful replication command-line tool.
MS TechNet reference,
Wikipedia article about robocopy,
Full command switch guide,
Batch scripting guide.
I like to use VBscript for this kind of thing. The VBS engine is on every recent windows machine and the language is a little more like real programming than a batch script.
Also, if your installer grows to require WMI functions too, this becomes a piece of cake.