• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Unix

    Basic Bash Functions

    According to @johnkitzmiller, you can’t spell function without fun. So let’s have some fun! What’s a function? Think of it as a script inside a script. Define functions at the beginning of the script instead of making repeated calls to the same task within a script. The other nice thing about functions is that the act of compartmentalization makes them simple to insert into a number of different scripts. For example, if you do a lot of curl commands to pull down something in a lot of different scripts, having the grabbing of the data as a function, then the parsing of it into an array as a function and…

  • Mac OS X

    Fixing Color Problems with Ubuntu

    The Terminal application defaults have a problem passing colors with Ubuntu and other types of Linux machines with properly formed .bashrc files. This is because those systems do not know how to interpret the Lion xterm-color256 terminal declaration. The fix is to change this setting to xterm-color. This needs to be done for each Terminal default. Click on each (Basic, Grass, Homebrew, etc) and then click on the Advanced tab. From there, just set the Declare terminal as: to xterm-color and close. This can also be done through the command line. These settings are stored in the com.apple.Terminal.plist per user, in their ~/Library/Preferences. The key for each is in TerminalType,…