Week of bash scripts – rps and commentstrip

These two scripts will respectively: find if a program is running, and strip-comments from text files. The first is useful if you need to see if the program is running or if you need to kill the process with it’s id, comment strip is a good tool to use if posting configurations on forums as often developers or advanced users already know what the settings actually do.

rps

#!/bin/sh
# rps - running program search

ps aux | grep --color=always $@ | grep -v grep | grep -v "$0"

commentstrip

Commentstrip will display the output to the terminal but if you got xclip installed, the ‘c’ flag can be used to copy the output to the clipboard (i.e. ‘commentstrip c file’).

#!/bin/bash
# commentstrip - output file without comments or blanklines

# text color variables
bldred='\e[1;31m' # red - bold
bldblu='\e[1;34m' # blue
undwht='\e[4;37m' # white - underline
txtrst='\e[0m'    # text reset

# display usage if argument isn't given
if [ -z $1 ]; then
  echo " commentstrip <*c> <filename> - output file without comments or blanklines"
  exit 1
fi

# be sure that file exists
if [[ ! -f $@ ]] && [[ ! -f $2 ]]; then
  echo -e " ${bldred}*${txtrst} file doesn't exist"
  exit 2
fi

case $1 in
  # copy output to xorg server clipboard
  c ) shift
      # exit if root (root doesn't have access to user xorg server)
      if [[ `whoami` == root ]]; then
        echo -e " ${bldred}*${txtrst} must be regular user to copy to clipboard"
        exit 3; else
        grep -vh '^[[:space:]]*\(#\|$\)' "$@" | xclip -selection c
        echo -e " ${bldblu}*${txtrst} stripped contents of ${undwht}$@${txtrst} and copied to xorg server clipboard"
      fi ;;
  # else, display output to terminal
  * ) grep -vh '^[[:space:]]*\(#\|$\)' "$@" ;;
esac

The final day of week of bash scripts… phew! I’d like to thank everyone that posted comments, and to those that stopped by this week. Enjoy.