Making a Bunch of Symbolic Links.

I have two collection of Maildir folders to store my mail. One in a ~/work/mail folder for my work mail, and ~/mail for my personal projects. I want the work mailboxes to be symbolically linked to the personal ones (some work email, notably from GitHub comes to a personal address, and I want to be able to refile as necessary.) I moved the work maildirs last week, so I needed to create about 15 symbolic links, and so I wrote the following little loop:

cd ~/mail
for i in `find ~/work/mail -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1`; do
   ln -s $i work.`echo $i | cut -d / -f 6`
done

Should be useful, no?

Commit all Git Changes

For a long time, I used the following bit of code to provide the inverse operation of "git add .". Where "git add ." adds all uncommited changes to the staging area for the next commit, the following commit automatically removes all files that are no longer present on the file-system from the staging area for the next commit.

if [ "`git ls-files -d | wc -l`" -gt "0" ]; then
  git rm --quiet `git ls-files -d`
fi

This is great if you forget to use "git mv" or you delete a file using rm, you can run this operation and pretty quickly have git catch up with the state of reality. In retrospect I'm not really sure why I put the error checking if statement in there.

There are two other implementations of this basic idea that I'm aware of:

for i in `git ls-files -d`; do
  git rm --quiet $i
done

Turns out you can do pretty much the same thing with the following statement using the xargs command and you end up with something that's a bit more succinct:

git ls-files --deleted -z | xargs -0 git rm --quiet

I'm not sure why, I think it's because I started being a Unix nerd after Linux dropped the argument number limit, and as a result I've never really gotten a chance to become familiar with xargs. While I sometimes sense that a problems is xargs shaped, I almost never run into "too many arguments" errors, and always attempt other solutions first.

A Note About xargs

If you're familiar with xargs skip this section. Otherwise, it's geeky story time.

While this isn't currently an issue on Linux, some older UNIX systems (including older versions of Linux,) had this limitation where you could only pass a limited number of arguments to a command. If you had too many, the command would produce an error, and you had to find another way.

I'm not sure what the number was, and the specific number isn't particularly important to the story. Generally, I understand that this problem would crop up when attempting to take the output of a command like find and piping or passing it to another command like grep or the like. I'm not sure if you can trigger "too many arguments" errors with globbing (i.e. *) but like I said this kind of thing is pretty uncommon these days.

One of the "other ways" was to use the xargs command which basically takes very long list of arguments and passes them one by one (or in batches?) to another command. My gut feeling is that xargs can do some things, like the above a bit more robustly, but that isn't experimentally grounded. Thoughts?

Onward and Upward!