Latest In Tech » Scripting

Sorting Full Screen Apps in OS X’s Mission Control

sarvinc — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:06:41 +0000

Trying to sort full-screen apps in Lion? Here’s how

System Preferences
Mission Control
Check “Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use

This allows you to organize your full-screen apps by alt-tabbing through them (yeah not the greatest).

Bonus:
I’m still trying to get used to the three-finger swipes and accidentally alt-tab once in a while. Alt-tabbing once I have my apps organized ruins everything. I’ve whipped up a automator app that simply toggles the preference for you. Toggle it to turn the preference on, sort your apps and toggle it again to turn the preference off.

Tab Settings.app

I’d love to see what people do with it. Here’s the raw apple-script:
tell application "System Preferences" activate set the current pane to pane id "com.apple.preference.expose" end tell


tell application "System Events"

	tell application process "System Preferences"

		--get the name of every checkbox of group 2 of window "Mission Control"

		click checkbox "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use" of group 2 of window "Mission Control"

	end tell

end tell

tell application "System Preferences" to close every window

Here’s an updated Automator Service that doesn’t show the System Preferences pane when changing the Alt-Tab setting:

Start Automator
Choose “Service”
Select the “Run Shell Script” action

Copy and paste this into the workflow:
current_value=$(defaults read com.apple.dock mru-spaces) if [ $current_value = 1 ] then defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool No /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m "Automatically Rearrange is Turned Off" else defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool Yes /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m "Automatically Rearrange is Turned On" fi

killall Dock

Install rar and unrar on a Mac OX 10.5+

sarvinc — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:55:09 +0000

A great tutorial can be found here.

Perl grabbing output from a shell command

sarvinc — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:00:19 +0000

$result = `ls -l $file 2>&1`;

Re-configuring CPAN

sarvinc — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:42:56 +0000

sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
o conf init

Xargs choking on whitespace

sarvinc — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:59:53 +0000

Every once in a while the normal recursive bash command doesn’t work and I resort to using find with xargs. Of course xargs hates whitespace and I often find myself working with files created by others. xargs chokes on whitespace thinking it’s an indication of a new file. The solution is to get find to send null separated values instead of newline separated values, and get xargs to check for null characters instead of newlines. Both can be accomplished, find’s -print0 sends null values, xarg’s -0 will accept null values.

Here’s an example:
find ./website/ ! -perm -775 -print0 | xargs -0 chown production:wheel

via linuxdevcenter

Catching System output from Perl

sarvinc — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:00:09 +0000

I’m too lazy to install a perl module, on a local computer, for a quick whois on a few domains. Catching the shell’s output is more convenient in this case.

Instead of first writing and then reading from a file, it makes more sense to use a pipe. Here’s a quick example:

#!/usr/bin/perl open (WHOIS, "/usr/bin/whois ewayauto.com |"); $i=1; while (){ print "Line # ".$i." ".$_; $i++; } print "All done!\n"; close WHOIS;

Thanks to netadmintools for this one.

Find current user with in an Applescript

sarvinc — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:27:08 +0000

I’m in the middle of testing this, but it should work:
set MyName to do shell script "whoami"

Oracle

sarvinc — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:08:30 +0000

I’ve been trying to pick-up a little oracle db experience. In Oracle sqlplus, if you type ed or edit at the command prompt, sqlplus will put the last command into an editor buffer for easy editing. Here’s a quick tip for you; the default editor in Oracle sqlplus can be changed to vim pretty quickly.

Here’s what you do:
1. Create the file login.sql, with any editor, in your home directory
2. Add the line “DEFINE _EDITOR=vim” to the file login.sql

From now on typing the command “ed” in to Oracle sqlplus will open the buffer with vim.

Backup data using Amazon’s S3 on the Mac

sarvinc — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:26:38 +0000

There are other solutions to backups not involving Amazon’s S3. If you insist on using S3, this seems like the easiest solution, the comments hold particular value; suggested usage includes rdiffs and swapping out launchd for Automator and ical.

Read the article here.

bc a GNU CLI Calculator

sarvinc — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:15:36 +0000

Handy calculator for the command-line. Hey, it’s already on the mac.