Fun Saturday Writing A Quick Script

I woke up this morning and came up with the bright idea that I wanted to add the modified date to my posts. It was so damned hot in here, and just getting outside and stuff, I never really got started any further than thinking about it.

I actually miss doing this sort of stuff, but I had a lot on my mind for the past several months. With that mind clutter, wasn’t able to focus as well as other times in the past. It’s been on the back of my mind, though. Today was the day I was going to get at it. I refused to allow myself to fall into older habits and do it by hand.

I woke up this morning thinking about it and got started. I at first toyed with using programs from the ports tree but then thought it’s as good a time as any to just learn to make awk work. After all, that is what it is designed for. Instead of usikng awk I went with sed as I am less familiar with that tool.

Also, I started out writing it for the fish shell but then decided to just stick with sh instead. That shell is available everywhere and doesn’t need to be installed. Fish is great for interactive use, though!

It did take me a little longer than it should have to get things sorted, but I am rusty with shell scripting and only do stuff very occasionally. I don’t believe I have done anything with it in the past several years.

Some aspects of it came back to me pretty quickly, and others not so quickly, but more practice would help me. More than once I wanted to type {% like on Zola templates or other things from that. That templating engine is much fresher in my mind.

It is a gift to me to have the means, time, and patience to work on learning new things or things that I don’t do too often. I am grateful to have the audacity to not be settled with good enough or just works. I like tweaking things and breaking and learning new approaches to problems.

It was a good day of perusing many files. I chose to do that on the internet because the fonts are a bit easier to see than in Konsole with my larger text. Man, if I had had these tools available to me when I was a kid… I wanted to grok everything back then. I still do want to understand everything, but I have realistic expectations now.

When I was a kid, I wanted to have a conversation with Richard Feynman, among others. Just let them talk and listen and learn from them. Carl Sagan was another.

I tweaked a bit of the Caddyfile on my server too before I started this. It all started because I noticed that small bug in my templates the other day. One thing led to another, and here I am. It’s like, well, I might as well do this and that since I am here thinking about it now.

Here is the page with and about that script to add date updated into my markdown files.

I urge you to get out there and learn something new. Challenge yourself to solve a problem even if it isn’t really something that needs to be done. I rank that up there with exercise. I feel like now I might be in the state of mind to get back on board with this stuff on a more regular basis. Not only that, but I have been wanting to look at Rust programming again too. Now that it is cooler, I think I will have more ffocuse to get back on that too.