I recently posted an approach for a self-updating bash script. Shortly after using it in production, I noticed a critical shortcoming. Due to the simple way in which I implemented my update checking (an MD5 sum over the script itself), changes to the script interpreter line (aka shebang) would cause the script to output that [...]

A difference between the originally installed version and the current was detected! If you have ever read that warning in the TYPO3 extension manager, you know exactly how annoying it can be to find that difference. You made some minor tweak or fix and forgot about it and now you don’t know what it was [...]

I recently tried to use pv in a bash script so that it wouldn’t interfere with my concept of communicating overall progress to the user. When I usually like to do is to echo -n a description of the current task and then later echo either “Done.” or “Failed!” (or something similar). Obviously, that somewhat [...]

While working on a bash script, I wanted to check if I could rm -rf a folder before actually attempting it and flushing the console with tons of write permission error messages. Upon failing to find what I wanted online, I constructed this beauty: find . \( -exec test -w {} \; -o \( -exec [...]

Note: There is a revised version of this script available. While working on the typo3scripts project, I wanted to implement a self-updating feature into each of the scripts as that seemed most convenient for where these scripts would be used. My initial approach was OK but left me wondering. So, here is the revised approach [...]