userland-book/literary_problem

2. a literary problem =====================

The previous chapter introduced a bunch of tools using contrived examples. Now we'll look at a real problem, and work through a solution by building on tools we've already covered.

So on to the problem: I write poetry.

{rimshot dot wav}

Most of the poems I have written are not very good, but lately I've been thinking that I'd like to comb through the last ten years' worth and pull the least-embarrassing stuff into a single collection.

I've hinted at how the contents of my blog are stored as files, but let's take a look at the whole thing:

$ ls -F ~/p1k3/archives/
1997/  2003/  2009/  bones/     meta/
1998/  2004/  2010/  chapbook/  winfield/
1999/  2005/  2011/  cli/       wip/
2000/  2006/  2012/  colophon/
2001/  2007/  2013/  europe/
2002/  2008/  2014/  hack/

(ls, again, just lists files. -F tells it to append a character that shows it what type of file we're looking at, such as a trailing / for directories. ~ is a shorthand that means "my home directory", which in this case is /home/brennen.)

Each of the directories here holds other directories. The ones for each year have sub-directories for the months of the year, which in turn contain files for the days. The files are just little pieces of HTML and Markdown and some other stuff. Many years ago, before I had much of an idea how to program, I wrote a script to glue them all together into a web page and serve them up to visitors. This all sounds complicated, but all it really means is that if I want to write a blog entry, I just open a file and type some stuff. Here's an example for March 1st:

$ cat ~/p1k3/archives/2014/3/1
<h1>Saturday, March 1</h1>

<markdown>
Sometimes I'm going along on a Saturday morning, still a little dazed from the
night before, and I think something like "I should just go write a detailed
analysis of hooded sweatshirts".  Mostly these thoughts don't survive contact
with an actual keyboard.  It's almost certainly for the best.
</markdown>

And here's an older one that contains a short poem:

$ cat ~/p1k3/archives/2012/10/9
<h1>tuesday, october 9</h1>

<freeverse>i am a stateful machine
i exist in a manifold of consequence
a clattering miscellany of impure functions
and side effects</freeverse>

Notice that <freeverse> bit? It kind of looks like an HTML tag, but it's not. What it actually does is tell my blog script that it should format the text it contains like a poem. The specifics don't matter for our purposes (yet), but this convention is going to come in handy, because the first thing I want to do is get a list of all the entries that contain poems.

Remember grep?

$ grep -ri '<freeverse>' ~/p1k3/archives > ~/possible_poems

Let's step through this bit by bit:

First, I'm asking grep to search recursively, ignoring case. "Recursively" just means that every time the program finds a directory, it should descend into that directory and search in any files there as well.

grep -ri

Next comes a pattern to search for. It's in single quotes because the characters < and > have a special meaning to the shell, and here we need the shell to understand that it should treat them as literal angle brackets instead.

'<freeverse>'

This is the path I want to search:

~/p1k3/archives

Finally, because there are so many entries to search, I know the process will be slow and produce a large list, so I tell the shell to redirect it to a file called possible_poems in my home directory:

> ~/possible_poems

This is quite a few instances...

$ wc -l ~/possible_poems
679 /home/brennen/possible_poems

...and it's also not super-pretty to look at:

$ head -5 ~/possible_poems
/home/brennen/p1k3/archives/2011/10/14:<freeverse>i've got this friend has a real knack
/home/brennen/p1k3/archives/2011/4/25:<freeverse>i can't claim to strive for it
/home/brennen/p1k3/archives/2011/8/10:<freeverse>one diminishes or becomes greater
/home/brennen/p1k3/archives/2011/8/12:<freeverse>
/home/brennen/p1k3/archives/2011/1/1:<freeverse>six years on

Still, it's a decent start. I can see paths to the files I have to check, and usually a first line. Since I use a fancy text editor, I can just go down the list opening each file in a new window and copying the stuff I'm interested in to a new file.

This is good enough for government work, but what if instead of jumping around between hundreds of files, I'd rather read everything in one file and just weed out the bad ones as I go?

$ cat `grep -ril '<freeverse>' ~/p1k3/archives` > ~/possible_poems_full

This probably bears some explaining. grep is still doing all the real work here. The main difference from before is that -l tells grep to just list any files it finds which contain a match.

`grep -ril '<freeverse>' ~/p1k3/archives`

Notice those backticks around the grep command? This part is a little trippier. It turns out that if you put backticks around something in a command, it'll get executed and replaced with its result, which in turn gets executed as part of the larger command. So what we're really saying is something like:

$ cat [all of the files in the blog directory with <freeverse> in them]

Did you catch that? I just wrote a command that rewrote itself as a different, more specific command. And it appears to have worked on the first try:

$ wc ~/possible_poems_full
 17628  80980 528699 /home/brennen/possible_poems_full

Welcome to wizard school.