I have a novel idea; let’s not do that anymore!

There are undoubtedly dozens of solutions for this little problem, but I chose Ruby + Twitter for a few reasons:

• I like Ruby
• I like Twitter
• I want hassle-free SMS
• I want portability (small client-side configuration)

So, with those things in mind, here is what I’ve come up with:

1) A Special Twitter Account

Create a new account for your notifications. You’ll most likely want to protect its tweets unless you don’t mind just about anybody seeing all the notifications you’re sending to yourself. Once the account is set up, follow it from your main Twitter account and enable SMS notifications for its tweets.

2) A dead simple Ruby script

I’ve written about John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem a couple of times, and it once again makes its way into the toolbelt. Install if you don’t have it:

jerod@mbp:~$ sudo gem install twitter

This gem makes the notification script just a few lines of code:

You can name the script anything you like. I call it twitter_notify. Make it executable and ensure it is in your shell’s execution path (I symlink it so I can keep my code organized):

jerod@mbp:~$ chmod +x src/ruby/twitter/twitter_notify.rb
jerod@mbp:~$ ln -s ~/src/ruby/twitter/twitter_notify.rb /usr/local/bin/twitter_notify

3) A Call to Notify

Anytime you want to be notified that a command has completed, just follow it with the twitter_notify command. There are a couple of ways to do this, and they are slightly different:

jerod@mbp:~$ cp /tmp/bigfile.tgz /somewhere/else && twitter_notify "all done copying!"

Or:

jerod@mbp:~$ cp /tmp/bigfile.tgz /somewhere/else; twitter_notify "command complete!"

Using && will only call the second command if the first command completed successfully. Using ; will call the second command regardless of how the first command completed. Adjust usage depending on your circumstance.

4) A Deserved Break

Now that you’ve set up your tools to handle the grunt work, walk away from the computer! Go outside, watch a movie, hang with your fam, who cares! When that task is complete you’ll get an SMS and you can deal with it then.

That’s all I got.

What “cheat” offers is a plethora (currently 601) of text-based cheat sheets at the tip of your fingers. Go ahead, give it a try:

jerod@mbp:~$ sudo gem install cheat
jerod@mbp:~$ cheat apache2

Pretty cool, huh?

Some cheats are kind of long, so pipe them to “less” for pagination:

jerod@mbp:~$ cheat git | less

List all the cheats available:

jerod@mbp:~$ cheat sheets

Or find one matching a search string:

jerod@mbp:~$ cheat sheets | grep [your search string]

To learn more about cheat:

jerod@mbp:~$ cheat cheat

Cheat on Rails

There a bunch of Rails-related cheats, which are great help in a pinch. Here are a few that I highly recommend:

• status_codes – all HTTP status codes and their matching Rails symbols
• rails_migrations – for when you forget valid data types
• rubydebug – debugging is powerful but it’s easy to forget how
• rails_tips – nice reminders and tips for beginners
• jquery – you are using jQuery in your Rails apps, right?

Let me know if you find any juicy cheats that I should know about.

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ..
jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby$

We all know that . represents the current working directory and .. represents the current working directory’s parent directory. If we follow this pattern to its logical conclusion, then … would represent the current working directory’s parent’s parent, etc. Unfortunately, cd doesn’t work that way.

jerod@mbp:~src/ruby/rails$ cd ...
-bash: cd: ...: No such file or directory
jerod@mbp:~$

Total bummer!

Instead, we have to repeat ourselves for every directory up we want to move. So, we end up typing commands that look like this:

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ../..
jerod@mbp:~/src$

The more directories up to move in the file system, the more ridiculous the command becomes:

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails/box-office/app/models$ cd ../../../../..
jerod@mbp:~/src$

*note* - in this contrived example, cd ~/src would be a much better way of navigating

If you’ve ever typed a command like that one, you feel my pain. I put up with this for a long time, but I’ve finally had enough of it. Here is a simple bash function that allows us to simply append .‘s to the cd command for each directory we want to move up.

*update* – some guy pointed out that my function didn’t correctly handle pathnames with spaces in it and he was kind enough to supply a simplified function to the one I wrote.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

function cd () {
  if [[ $# > 0 ]]; then
    if [ ${1:0:2} == '..' ]; then
      rest=${1:2}
      rest=${rest//./../}
      builtin cd "${1:0:2}/${rest}"
    else
      builtin cd "$1"
    fi
  else
    builtin cd
  fi
}

This is a simple wrapper function that ends up calling the shell’s built-in cd command. Drop it in your .bashrc or .bash_profile and give it a whirl!

jerod@mbp:~/src/ruby/rails$ cd ...
jerod@mbp:~/src$

Much better!

p.s. – I added this function to my .bashrc which I store in a dotfiles repo on GitHub. Feel free to check it out and see if there’s any other useful tricks you can add to your command-line répertoire.