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I’ve been using zsh for a while as my preferred shell. I have a hacked-together zshrc file, and yet really wanted to use it across multiple systems. Some of those systems are running Mac OS X, others Solaris, and still others Linux. Executables are in a different locations and even have different switches across this range of systems, so my cobbled zshrc was not helping me.

As I was about to fall asleep last night, it finally hit me that fixing my zshrc would be a good thing to do. I jotted down some notes about an idea to reorganize it, and did something about it today.

Of course, since I’ve checked my zshrc and other dotfiles into a Mercurial repository, I could experiment without fear.

I created three top-level functions, with one “case” statement in each. Case statements may be evil in some fashion, but they are one of the things I like about shell scripting. These statements do allow the script to make choices based on the host, operating system, or shell that it was running in. (Yeah, it’s a zshrc, but I sometimes do stupid things — like sourcing it in bash on the one Linux system that won’t let me switch to zsh. Site5, I’m looking at you.)

I separated all the important sections of my zshrc into their own individual function calls. Each of those function calls was placed into one of the applicable case statements.

The case statement functions figure out the conditions the zshrc is running in, and then run the other functions to set up my environment.

The changes tested well from first try across the various platforms and hosts I log in to. I did have a minor problem with the `hostname` command, because Solaris doesn’t have a “-s” flag for it. Eventually, I solved that — and the odd “uname: error in setting name: Not owner” error I got, even though I wasn’t directly running `uname` there — by replacing `hostname` with `uname`.

Thankfully, it works for me, and it should be a little easier to manage changes in the future.

The Xcode 3.1 Developer Tools install both the standard GNU compiler, gcc, and the LLVM compiler, llvm-gcc. I thought I’d try my hand at compiling something with LLVM, so naturally I decided to update my instructions for compiling Rsync 3 as a Universal Binary for Leopard. Let’s try Rsync 3.0.3!

The following set of instructions, of course, requires that you have already installed the Xcode 3.1, available as a download from Apple. To choose LLVM as your C compiler temporarily for this compile, specify the CC=“/Developer/usr/bin/llvm-gcc” variable (as explained in the LLVM FAQ).

$ cd /tmp
$ curl -O curl -O http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ rm rsync-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ curl -O http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ rm rsync-patches-3.0.3.tar.gz
$ cd rsync-3.0.3
$ patch -p1 <patches/fileflags.diff
$ patch -p1 <patches/crtimes.diff
$ ./prepare-source
$ env CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk -arch i386 \
-arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 \
-arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64" \
CC="/Developer/usr/bin/llvm-gcc" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-dependency-tracking
$ make
$ ./rsync --version
rsync version 3.0.3 protocol version 30
Copyright (C) 1996-2008 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
Web site: http://rsync.samba.org/
Capabilities:
64-bit files, 32-bit inums, 64-bit timestamps, 64-bit long ints,
socketpairs, hardlinks, symlinks, IPv6, batchfiles, inplace,
append, ACLs, xattrs, no iconv, symtimes, file-flags
rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.
$ file ./rsync
./rsync: Mach-O universal binary with 5 architectures
./rsync (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
./rsync (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
./rsync (for architecture ppc970): Mach-O executable ppc
./rsync (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
./rsync (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
$ lipo -info ./rsync
Architectures in the fat file: ./rsync are: i386 ppc7400 ppc970 ppc64 x86_64
$ sudo make install


Warning: I have not tested Rsync 3 compiled with LLVM to ensure that it operates at all or is compatible with Rsync compiled by GCC. I haven’t compared the compilation speed against GCC’s performance, determined whether the files are larger/smaller, or have produced a more optimized binary. You use the software compiled with these instructions at your own risk.

Most of the original instructions were helpfully documented by Mike Bombich. My contributions are simply:

• Universal Binary support: four- or five-way, depending on whether you want to use “-arch i386 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc970 -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64” (which gives specific optimized binaries for PowerPC G4 and G5 systems in 32-bit mode) or “-arch i386 -arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch x86_64” (for more general 32-bit PowerPC support, as I did in my previous article).
• LLVM compilation: use of the llvm-gcc front end, which hopefully produces a working Rsync 3.

When you have the print queue window open for a printer in Mac OS X Leopard, the Printer menu > Print Test Page command is active. That command sends the CUPS test page to the selected print queue.

The test page file itself is a PostScript document located at this path:

/usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps

Since Leopard — like Mac OS X versions since Panther, has a built-in PostScript interpreter — you can open up this PostScript document and have it rendered as a PDF. By default, it will be sent to the Preview application.

It’s helpful to be able to view this document on-screen, so you can see what it is supposed to look like, in case your printer is not working as intended. You can compare the on-screen results with the printed output to verify how well your printer is working.

Mac OS X has a type of URL specifically for opening UNIX man pages. For me, using one of these URLs opens a new Terminal window to display the man page. Just put the name of the man page after the “x-man-page://” URL scheme to create one of these URLs.

For example, a link to the rsync man page would look like “x-man-page://rsync” when written out.

This is a handy way to refer to UNIX man pages with other Mac OS X users in e-mail correspondence, on mailing lists, or on the Web. Because of that, I wanted a quicker way to create these man page URLs. I wrote the Mac OS X Service named “Man Page URL for Command” to satisfy that desire. The “Man Page URL for Command” Service is provided “as-is” with no warranty.

The Service was wrapped up with ThisService by Peter Hosey, as with my earlier Mac OS X Service to shorten a URL with Bit.ly.

To install the Service:

1. Unzip the downloaded file.
2. Drag the unzipped Service to /Library/Services (for all users) or ~/Library/Services (for just the current user).

To use it:

1. Select a single word from some text you can highlight in an application. The word should ideally correspond to the name of a general UNIX command (“ls”), a Mac OS X-specific command (“dsmemberutil”), or another term the matches a man page (“sshd_config”). The Service is specifically coded to work only when you select a single word; if you select a text string with any white space in it, the Service will just return your original text. The Service also checks to ensure that the selected word corresponds to either a command in the $PATH or an existing man page, so it will not generate a “x-man-page://” for just any word.
2. Choose “Man Page URL for Command” from the Services submenu of the application menu. As long as you have selected only a single word that matches a command or existing man page, the selection will be replaced with the “x-man-page://” URL.

Thanks to Nigel for the inspiration.

There can be times when you need to troubleshoot Directory Services in Mac OS X during system starts up. Directory Services apparently sits above and below the kernel — depending on what each of those components needs to do — so having debugging capability early on in the boot process can help you hone in on problems.

To enable debug logging at startup, run the following at the command line:

$ touch /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/.DSLogDebugAtStart

… and then, on the next restart, debug logging will be enabled. This is equivalent to running:

$ sudo killall -USR1 DirectoryService

… but the advantage is is that debug logging begins at startup, rather than whenever you can log in and start it manually.

Remove the file from the path above when you want to disable the logging for the subsequent restart. As a file whose name starts with a dot, you won’t see it listed by default in the Finder. (The Finder hides dot files by default.)

$ rm /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/.DSLogDebugAtStart

Since the Bit.ly URL-shortening service is all the rage lately, and I hadn’t seen anyone create a Mac OS X Service for it yet, I decided to try my hand at it.

Here’s the result. The core is a relatively simple Python script and requires Mac OS X 10.5 (or Python 2.5 if you have an earlier version of Mac OS X). The Service was wrapped up with ThisService by Peter Hosey. It’s my first attempt at creating a Mac OS X Service — with or without ThisService — and I hope it works for you. However, it is provided “as-is” with no warranty.

That said, if you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

Also, I’m not counting this as an endorsement of Bit.ly; I just looked at info on their site and thought I could probably script it and, as you can see, I did.

To install the Service:

1. Unzip the downloaded file.
2. Drag the unzipped Service to /Library/Services (for all users) or ~/Library/Services (for just the current user).

To use it:

1. Select the full text of an “http” or “https” URL that you’d like to shorten. (Don’t just select a site’s domain name. The Service is specifically coded to work on full URLs starting with “http” or “https.” So, “www.jaharmi.com” will not work but “http://www.jaharmi.com” will.)
2. Choose “Shorten URL with Bit.ly” from the Services submenu of the application menu. The selected URL will be replaced with the text of the shortened URL from Bit.ly. If it is not, the original URL will remain.

Of special note, however, is that if you shorten URLs with Bit.ly this way rather than through your browser, you probably won’t see them show up in your history (the most recent 15 URLs you’ve shortened). The script just shortens URLs for you and does so outside of your browser, so whatever cookies or other tracking Bit.ly is doing to generate your history, it doesn’t appear to carry over when using this simple little Service.

If you want to search the mailing list archives for the MacEnterprise.org list with LaunchBar’s Search Templates feature, add the following to your LaunchBar configuration:

http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S2=MACENTERPRISE&q=*&s=&f=&a=&b=

I added it in my personal search templates for UTF-8, named it “MacEnterprise list archives,” and saved it in my LaunchBar configuration. This makes it much faster to find topics that have appeared on the MacE list, because they are a few keystrokes away. LaunchBar substitutes your encoded search terms for the asterisk after the “&q=” text, and that’s where the magic lies.

The Lullabot Web site has a clever way to help answer the question of “Is that site running Drupal?” Angie Byron mentions that the HTTP “Expires” header returned by Drupal corresponds to a specific default date. Look for that date in the HTTP headers, and you can make a reasonable guess that a site is a Drupal site — or at least one that hasn’t modified one of the core files.

Some commenters posted notes about how to do the same thing with wget and then curl. I expanded on the curl instructions to make them a little more robust (especially in the case of redirects or URL rewriting), and here’s the result:

$ curl -fsIL http://jaharmi.com/ 2>&1 | grep -q -m 1 "Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT" && echo "Yes, this appears to be a Drupal site." || echo "No, this does not appear to be a Drupal site."
Yes, this appears to be a Drupal site.

It’s taken about a decade but I finally read the man page for “less.” Here are some important keyboard commands for navigating through files with it that I wanted to note for my own future use. If someone else gets a benefit from this, great, but it’s already helping me jump through man pages with more ease. (And it gave me an opportunity to write a post with a really ambiguous title.)

These commands had eluded me for a long time, even though it would have been great to know them. After all, less is the default pager in Mac OS X. Thanks to the wonders of air travel, I had some time to read some off-line documentation.

Of course, I’ve long used “/” followed by some text to search through man pages, and that’s worth knowing if you don’t already. One useful trick I picked up was the search “/^EXAM” (props to Adam for mentioning the caret and making my recipe one character longer, but more specific) to search for the examples section.

Despite my general feeling of ambivalence toward Apple WWDC 2008 this year, I have woken up on the day after the conclusion of my trip with a feeling of confidence.

I’m sure that will wear off in the coming hours, days, and months, but my state of mind right now is very positive. I wanted to remember I had it. Perhaps the biggest single contributor to this feeling is enduring of 22 hours of travel — and 37 straight hours awake — on the way back. Survival can really lift your spirits.

I woke up this morning with a craving for music by Mike Doughty, so I played “Looking at the World from the Botton of a Well”. It hit the spot. (“27 Jennifers” is on the WWDC 2008 iMix, but it doesn’t fit my mood nearly as well.)

It was great to see everyone this year — some old friends and some new friends. The relationships truly make the conference for me, now that I’ve been to so many sessions that just change incrementally each year. This is true even if I didn’t follow everyone to Dave’s afterwards; maybe that’s for another year.

I was surprised at the amount of movement within and between organizations … so many people I know have different jobs (and even homes) since I last saw them in 2006. The Mac landscape is changing. Even with its growth, it could be maturing. That kind of positive sign can breed confidence, too.

It was especially meaningful to me to be able to visit some friends of the family on the first weekend, and then my best friend’s family on the second.