TIL

2020-11-07 Remove-Item -Exclude versus Get-ChildItem -Exclude | Remove-Item

Remove-Item . -Exclude file,directory,directory/* -Recurse

This command will preserve directory, but it will also wipe its contents! Even the wildcard won't stop that.

Use this instead:

Get-ChildItem -Exclude file,directory | Remove-Item -Recurse

Remove-Item supposedly worked as expected until PowerShell 3.0, but does no longer.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52143053/2715716

2020-11-01 Using Git patch instead of find and replace

I needed to replace a part of a source file in CI and wanted to do it on Windows, but not the ugly way PowerShell does it. This was for GitHub Actions, so PS is the default runner for run steps.

I figured I could just use git diff index.js > index.patch and then run git apply index.patch in CI to get my replacing done without using PowerShell and downloading any non-built-in software to the agent.

2020-10-28 MarkDown escape fenced code block

Use ~~~ to escape a fenced code block, like so:

~~~
I can use backticks all I want in here!
~~~

2020-10-28 NodeJS package.json license values

https://github.com/jslicense/spdx-license-ids/blob/master/index.json

2020-10-28 Install NPM binary globally before each test run

I am working on an NPM binary module and I would like to run the module by name during testing in a subdirectory of my repository.

The module is set up like this: there is an index.js in the root of the repo where all the magic happens and then there is a test folder and in it are some test files. I want to run a test which cds to the test folder and runs the binary as a global command in there, instead of referencing it by relative script path.

package.json

{
  "name": "name",
  "bin": {
    "name": "index.js"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "pretest": "npm unlink && npm link",
    "test": "cd test && name"
  }
}

The prelink step uses npm link to make the current module installed in the global scope. It may be faster to use --force to replace the existing one, but it prints an ugly warning.

The test step then just cds to the test folder and runs the command using its binary name. Thanks to the pretest we know that's the latest version of the command code as it gets put to the global scope just before we invoke it.

2020-10-27 JavaScript regex .* but not greedy

Ever needed to write a regex like this: start.*end and noticed that end will get eaten up as a part of .*? Just use .*? and then .*? will only match stuff up until end but will not eat end.

To-Do

Set up a TIL scanner and digest maker

Set up a GitHub Actions workflow which uses my github-api library to enumerate all my public and private repositories and look through their recent commits (since the last run - so the last day, in master only or on all branches is to be decided) and pick out the ones where the commit description starts with TIL. Collect all the TIL entries and make a digest, which then gets appended to the existing TIL collection in the readme of this repository which is categorized by the date.