in praise of Silver Searcher

Occasionally, I have to search lots of files for a pattern. It was only recently I discovered the wonderful silver searcher utility which saves me a lot of time.

To install ‘ag’ on Fedora, use the following (which isn’t entirely obvious or intuitive if you’re used to typing ‘ag’).

# sudo dnf install the_silver_searcher

I believe there is an Emacs interface which would save me even more time.

$ time ag 'sql statement execute time' ~

real    0m0.125s
user    0m0.128s
sys     0m0.257s

$ time find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i 'sql statement execute time'

real    0m23.725s
user    0m7.965s
sys     0m1.618s

extending Bash history

I have used the Unix bash shell for many years. As I am incredibly lazy and forgetful, I have become accustomed to using ctrl-r ‘find’ to find and scroll though the latest ‘find’ commands I have issued.

Occasionally, I noticed that a lengthy, complex, useful ‘find’ command’ (which I mercilessly plagiarised from a clever person via Google) was no longer in my shell history.

Investigations revealed the default bash history is a paltry 1000 commands so I decided to increase this to 10000 by adding the following line to ‘~/.bash_profile’.

how mu4e changed my life

Getting email

No mail. In three whole days. Weird. I wonder if it’s Thanksgiving over in the States. Not even any football related banter. Is this thing even on ?

Then I realised precisely why I was sitting alone in an island of blissful isolation, devoid of all email communications and staring at an Inbox in a perpetual state of ‘Zero’.

I had forgotten to configure inbound email.

When I was testing, I used mbsync to synchronise emails from my ISP which worked well (fast, reliable, well documented) with bi-directional sync between IMAP and my local Maildir.