append function

So, one of the things that I did today, was write a little shell function that will append text to the end of a file from the command line. I’m sharing it with you all because that seems like the thing to do, and I find it useful.

I’m sure there are more effective ways to accomplish this, but this works. To be fair, there’s nothing here that will protect you from yourself, but it shouldn’t be able to do much damage. I keep it in my .bash_profile, but that’s probably not the smartest thing in the world. Have fun.

ap() {
  file=$1;
  shift
  note=$*;
  echo -e '\n- '"$note" >> $file
}

Then to use the function, once it’s been loaded is, at the prompt:

$ ap filename.txt stuff that you want to append to the file

A couple of notes: You have to type in the full filename, thankfully we have tab completion. If you want to prepend, I think you just change the direction of the pointy brackets from >> to <<. Also I have it set up to add all notes as if they are a bullet point (in markdown hence the “-").

Onward and Upward!