Today I accidentally created a file whose name had a newline character in it. I didn’t notice it when I did it, but here’s how it showed up in my shell. There was a directory whose name shared the first few characters of the filename. [22:07] james_simas@widget /var/tmp $ ls o* oops? <--- Suspicious file! oops: <--- Directory I tried to delete it: [22:07] james_simas@widget /var/tmp $ rm 'oops?' rm: oops?...

I recently was having to work with Ansible for several days to deploy changes globally across prod. I was storing my playbook limit in a file like so: [18:45] james_simas@widget ~/Downloads $ cat limit.txt host1.domain.com host2.domain.com host3.domain.com At one point, I needed to use supply the list of hostnames in BASH, but rather than having them be newline separated, I needed them to be separated by commas like this: host1.domain.com,host2.domain.com,host3.domain.com I didn’t want to modify my original files (I still needed them) and this seemed like a problem somebody else has problably solved....

Today I was using Ansible’s tower_job_template module in a playbook. I needed to add extra variables to the job template, but Ansible’s public documentation of the the tower_job_template module had no examples of how to do this. I was unable to find any compelling examples on Google. I was a bit of poking around the Ansible API, it turns out this was far easier than I had anticipated. Without further ado, here’s how you use extra_vars_path:...

Setting up my blog has always been easy. Previous to today, you just had to: Provision an Ubuntu 18 VM somewhere (I’ve been using Digital Ocean) Install Apache and remove its default website Use Hugo to generate the site’s static files and copy them to the VM host Done! But, never being one to sit still, I’ve decided to up my game and move to automatic provisioning with Terraform and Ansible....

Today a coworker posed an interesting question to me. Given a BIG-IP configuration file with thousands of records like this… gtm pool /Common/p_example { members { /Common/2001:668:fc78:0:f811:3ef2:fed7:98cc:vs6_2001_668_fc78_0_f811-3ef2-fed7_98cc-80 { order 0 } } monitor /Common/gateway_icmp } …how can we easily replace every colon in the name : with \\:? In short, /Common/2001:668:fc78:0:f811:3ef2:fed7:98cc:vs6_2001_668_fc78_0_f811-3ef2-fed7_98cc-80 needed to become /Common/2001\\:668\\:fc78\\:0\\:f811\\:3ef2\\:fed7\\:98cc\\:vs6_2001_668_fc78_0_f811-3ef2-fed7_98cc-80. This must only be done on the lines with start with /Common and which also contain the string vs6....

If you’ve known me for a while, you probably know that I have a soap box. This soap box has “STOP USING SMS” written on the side in red Sharpie. It’s true. I hate SMS/MMS. The protocols are terrible and like hunting whales for oil. (Sure, you could do that, but why would you when there are so many better technologies out there?!) The Pain Points Slow Text messages are slow to deliver....

I’ve always been a bit hit-or-miss with sed and haven’t understood it to the level to which I wanted. Today I aimed to change that and these are my notes from sitting down to learn it. Replace a string in a file (first occurrence per line only): cat file.txt | sed 's/oldstring/newstring/' Replace a string in a file (all occurrences per line, i.e., globally): cat file.txt | sed 's/oldstring/newstring/g' Use your own delimiters by just dropping them in place of /:...

A few days ago, I finished my Digital Declutter Experiment. Here’s what I accomplished: Successfully fixed my leaky kitchen faucet Attempted to replace the burned out lights in my car’s climate control dashboard, but did not succeed. It turns out you have to take apart a ton of the dashboard to replace the tiny light-bulbs which burned out. I spent an hour and a half on it before deciding it was more work than it is worth to me....

Lists (Continued) Appending to lists is simple with lappend: Note: lappend takes just the name of the list. It updates the specified list, so you do not have to use set. % set list {this is {a list}} this is {a list} % lappend list {more stuff here} this is {a list} {more stuff here} % % puts $list this is {a list} {more stuff here} Inserting into a list is done with linsert....

I recently finished “Digital Essentialism” by Cal Newport. As part of my resolution to get more value from the books I read, I will be conducting his recommended “Digital Declutter” experiment for the next 30 days. As such, here are the technology rules I will follow from 2019-02-19 to 2019-03-21. The Rules Email My personal email will be checked once per day. I already do this, but feel like it is a useful habit, so I am continuing it....