Category Archives: Bash

Making pwd redundant

I’m going to keep this one brief, because I am mid-confirmation-and-paper-writing madness. I have seen too many people – both beginners and seasoned veterans – wandering around their Linux filesystem blindfolded:

Isn’t it hideous?

Whenever you want to see where you are, you have to execute pwd (present working directory), which will print your absolute location to stdout. If you have many terminals open at the same time, it is easy to lose track of where you are, and every other command becomes pwd; surely, I hear you cry, there has to be a better way!

Well, fear not! With a little tinkering with ~/.bashrc, we can display the working directory as part of the special PS1 environment variable, responsible for how your username and computer are displayed above. Putting the following at the top of ~/.bashrc

me=`id | awk -F\( '{print $2}' | awk -F\) '{print $1}'`
export PS1="`uname -n |  /bin/sed 's/\..*//'`{$me}:\$PWD$ "

… saving, and starting a new termanal window results in:

Much better!

I haven’t used pwd in 3 years.

Solving WORDLE with grep

People seem to have become obsessed with wordle, just like they became obsessed with sudoku. After my initial burst of “oh a new game!” had waned, I was left thinking “my time is precious and this is exactly what we have computers for”. With this in mind, below is my quick and dirty way of solving these. I’m sure the regexp gurus amongst you will have a more elegant solution.

Step 1: Make sure you’ve got /usr/share/dict/words installed. This is just a huge list of words in a specific language and for me, this required installing the British words list.

sudo apt-get install wbritish

Step 2: Go to wordle

Step 3: Pick a random 5-letter word as your starting point. This is where grep and /usr/share/dict/words comes in:

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