2012-05-15



There was an interesting thread in the  debianforum.de  (in  Ger-
man).  [0] The question was how  to  find  out  if  there's  data
available  on stdin.  In the end the thread resulted in important
lessons on the Unix philosophy.



To find out the lenght of a formated string in advance,  one  can
use:

     len = snprintf(NULL, 0, ...);

This was news to me. POSIX defines it:

     If the value of n is zero  on  a  call  to  snprintf(),
     nothing  shall  be  written,  the  number of bytes that
     would have been written had n been  sufficiently  large
     excluding the terminating null shall be returned, and s
     may be a null pointer.  [1]



Boris (krt) is reducing the feeds he reads. To a large part,  the
reason  is the broken feed technologies. I agree with him on this
topic.  Two of the feeds he still reads are mine. :-) In order to
improve his situation, I wrote the following shell script to send
him the entries via email directly:

     stamp="/var/tmp/${0##*/}"

     trap 'touch "$stamp"' 0
     test -f "$stamp" || exit 1

     for i in `find lue/txt -type f -cnewer "$stamp"` ; do
             for a in $addrs ; do
                     <"$i" mail -s "lue: ${i##*/}" "$a"
             done
     done

This resembles his own approach.

But in contrast to me, he primary sends emails  and  has  a  feed
only  as fallback. The mails I send to him now introduce the feed
alternative mail messages newly in my setup. I might extend it.



My notebook worked quite normally today. :-)

[0]  http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=136382
[1]  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/snprintf.html


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>