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<h2>remember/recall - what could've been a command line tool</h2>
<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>
<h3>Look before you leap</h3>
<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>
<h3>What went right</h3>
<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>
<h3>What went wrong</h3>
<p>Literally, everything else that could've went wrong did. The
"project" was a single bash script roughly 160 lines long
before I found out it wouldn'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'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>
<h4>You can't access un-committed bash history</h4>
<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'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>
<h3>Lesson learned</h3>
<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're trying to do will work.
Because after building all of these fancy bells and whistles, if it
can't do the basics, there is no point.</p>
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<i>Updated and finally posted February 16, 2020</i>
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