xbin

A suite of Unix command line tools for englightened pipelines.

xip

The name "zip" was already taken. This interlaces the contents of a variadic list of files, especially handy with subshell file descriptor replacement. The following shows the opposing sides of a six sided die. The first example works in BSD variants, and the second in SysV/Linux variants::

xip <(jot 6) <(jot 6 6 1) | xargs -n 2
xip <(seq 6) <(seq 6 -1 1) | xargs -n 2

dog

Buffers stdin into memory until it closes, then writes to a given file. This is handy for pipeline loops, where normally redirecting to and from the same file would result in premature truncation. The following are equivalent::

sort file
cat file | sort | dog file

shuffle

Shuffles the lines from standard input and writes them to standard output. If the input stream is indefinite, the input can be shuffled indefinitely by specifying a pool size as a second argument.

enquote

Enquotes every line from standard input and writes it to standard output. Handy for pipelines that end in xargs, when file -print0 and xargs -0 aren't really an option. The following are pretty close to equivalent:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 tar cf -
find . | enquote | xargs tar cf -

cycle

Reads all of standard input and writes it back, repeatedly, to standard output. The first pass gets written immediately, so an indifinite stream will only cause memory bloat at the rate at which cycle's standard output is consumed::

find . -name '*.mp3' \
| cycle \
| shuffle 10000 \
| enquote \
| xargs -n 1 mpg123

TODO

sample

Writes a random sample of the lines from standard input back out to standard output. Specify a sample size as an argument. The sample is in stable order. The input stream may safely be of indefinite size.