Lazyweb, Lazyweb: Commandline hinting

brad — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:53:13 +0200

The geeks out there who use commandline on a popular set of operating systems (linux) may or may not know about bash_completion. bash_completion is awesome, it adds more tabbing to your typing. You type ssh <tab> <tab> and it starts suggesting what you might want to type, like hosts, or switches. It autocompletes when it can, and it makes life very easy. To the non-geek this translates into very efficient commandlines, and that is why geeks dig the commandline. I always thought bash_completion was awesome, but lacking a critical feature. bash_completion doesn't work for programs it doesn't know about. This is logical, because, how can it. So I propose, oh lazyweb, that we agree upon a switch like --hint for all commandline apps which spits out it's help in a form that an add on like bash completion can easily use, so even if bash_completion doesn't know about it, it can find out about it as you tab. It would allow richer things like this:

yourhost$ ls -l <tab> <tab> 
       -l     use a long listing format
       Other Suggestions: ...

It would mean that everyone@opensource would need to figure out and agree upon a standard, but it would mean implementing hinting under different shells would be trivial to implement, and the problem gets farmed out to everyone who maintains their own packages, so hopefully we would see wider support. It is just a rad geek dream, really. A lot like my tab completion IRC/IM/Blogging dream (the one where you hit a <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> and it tells your friend what you want to say, without having to type it all out).

D-arb 1; Active Directory 0

brad — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:15:59 +0200

I work in a department which runs it's network using a windows domain controller (active directory). Now, as it stands, Samba can operate as a drop in ADS for a lot of cases, so it's ADS is pretty good. The major limitation to Samba's support is lack of DFS (Dynamic file share), the Microsoft equvalent of network symlinks. But that is not what this article is about.

Every few weeks my domain password expires. If you remember to change your password before it expires, then no problem, you can use smb, or net. Unfortunately I usually forget (since I use samba so infrequently), and then it means a trip to my nearest domain computer, to change my password, and back. I decided to take action. I dropped a sh script in /etc/cron.daily/ called 'rucsict'. The magic is simple:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/net -U Username%Password -S the.domain.controller RAP PASSWORD Username Password Password

So every day it refreshes my password. It could easily generate a new password every two weeks or something, but I am more worried about saving myself a trip every few weeks to change my password. So, I win.