- Author
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Tom Baker (tom at tombaker dot org)
- Copyright
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Copyright © 2012 by Tom Baker
- License
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Distributes under the Apache License, see LICENSE.txt in the source distro
Designed to process sets of plain-text lists – files composed solely of plain-text lines of screen or Tweet width – according to your evolving set of rules. Starting with an aggregate set of all lines from all lists, rules specify how lines matching a regular-expression pattern are to be moved from a source file to a target file. Shawkle starts by backing up all of the plain-text files in a folder, deletes the originals, then refreshes the files according to the rules. The names, composition, and sort order of list files can be changed by tweaking the rules to add keywords, comment out rules, and the like.
This project began in 1993 as a Korn shell script written using DOS 3.3 and the MKS Toolkit. The original script, Shuffle, was published in December 1994 in UnixWorld [1]. After using awk in a rewrite of the script, I published the rewritten script in December 2006 in lifehacker.com under the name Shawkle [2], with an expanded narrative about the rationale for its design. In 2011, I released Shawkle in a faster and expanded version completely rewritten in Python [3].
A development version of the source code for Shawkle (Python version) is now part of this Github project – see Google Code for the stable version [3,4].
As of December 2012, the version I actually use on a daily basis is called shuffle.py [5].