One thing I do a lot is select a region of text, then have it replaced with the output of a command.

The most common job is sorting a number of lines, such as "use XX:YY;" lines in perl scripts.

Finally having gotten annoyed enough about how clunky shell-command-on-region was I wrote my own lisp function:

• replace-region-command-output

Only after that did I discover M-x sort-lines. D'oh. Still I guess my solution is more general, and less difficult to use. (I find the use of the Emacs prefix troublesome to type; since you have to do it in advance - I almost always forget.)

I also learnt of M-x list-matching-lines yesterday. Thats a new discovery which really rocks. (I can use "^sub " to find a list of subroutines, etc.)

This could be improved, and fleshed out a lot if there were any interest.

But its neat as-is:

#!/bin/sh
#
#  Dump packages in the NEW queue.
#
#  This could be improved, perhaps:
#
#  --show-names --show-dates, etc.  Or just show all info in a table.
#
wget --quiet -O-  http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html | \
 perl -ne 'print $1 . "\n" if ( $_ =~ /^<td valign="top" class="sid">([^<]+)<\/td>$/ )'

I thought there was something similar in the devscripts package, or contained within debian-goodies but apparently not.

ObQuote:Battle Royale

Tags: debian, emacs, new-queue | 2 comments