posts/remember-recall-what-couldve-been-a-command-line-tool.html


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--post-date: 2020-02-16
--type: blog
    <article>
      <h1>remember/recall - what could've been a command line tool</h1>
      <p>During a meeting at work when I realized I often forget useful
      commands. So I had the bright idea to create a command line tool that
      would basically append a file with the command you wanted to remember
      that you could search over later if you wanted to recall a certain
      command. I figured I could it could just be a simple bash script that
      recalls your bash-history and appends it to a file, all things that are
      incredibly easy to do... or so I thought.</p>
      <h2>Look before you leap</h2>
      <p>This article is a reminder to myself to test the core functionality
      first, before decorating your program/script with all those bells and
      whistles. While I did learn a lot in the process it is always a good to
      check the basics first.</p>
      <h2>What went right</h2>
      <p>I actually ended up learning a lot during the development of the
      (never finished) tool. I had never used <code>getopts</code> inside a
      script before, which turned out to be extremely intuitive. That was all
      that went right...</p>
      <h2>What went wrong</h2>
      <p>Literally, everything else that could&#39;ve went wrong did. The
      &quot;project&quot; was a single bash script roughly 160 lines long
      before I found out it wouldn&#39;t work. It was a series of flags that
      enabled actions that called functions, some of which ended the script
      either successfully or not. It wasn&#39;t necessarily a mess to read (I
      tried to make it that every function ended up in an exit so I knew if I
      entered I would need to assume it terminated) but it was hard to follow
      when writing. I tried to allow it so you could default an action to make
      the CLI intuitive which lead to a messy set of if/elses and switch
      cases.</p>
      <h3>You can&#39;t access un-committed bash history</h3>
      <p>History command in a bash shell commits the history at the end of the
      session. This makes sense once you know this, there are a lot of reasons
      saving the commands to file after every execution is probably not the
      best idea. However, it can be enabled with a flag when you enable a shell
      session. But I didn&#39;t want to build a tool that required me to
      remember I had to add something to my bash_profile before it would work.
      I wanted something I could just copy onto a new machine and have access
      to its functionality.</p>
      <h2>Lesson learned</h2>
      <p>While developing a tool to help me remember things, I learned
      something I cannot forget: Test the core, simplest functionality first.
      Before you do anything validate what you&#39;re trying to do will work.
      Because after building all of these fancy bells and whistles, if it
      can&#39;t do the basics, there is no point.</p>
    </article>