Unix Text Editing Awesomeness

Oh, LaTeX acronym package, you won’t automatically alphabetize my list of acronyms?  Strange…  Let’s see if Unix will…

$ echo "\acro{SCADA}{Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition}
\acro{PLC}{Programmable Logic Controller}
\acro{RTU}{Remote Terminal Unit}
..." > toSort

$ for i in `cat toSort |sed "s/.*\\acro{\(.*\)}.*{.*}/\1/" | sort`;
do grep "{$i}" toSort; done
\acro{ADC}{analog to digital converter}
\acro{API}{application programming interface}
\acro{APT}{Advanced Persistent Threat}
\acro{ASCII}{American Standard Code for Information Interchange}
...

Unix, you rock my world.

Bash Dictionary - Terrible Hack of the Day

So, I just had a reason to implement something like a dictionary in Bash.  Of course, I could try to determine if such a feature exists already (it does in Bash 4, alas the default on OS X seems to be 3.2), but why not just try to hack something together?

Here’s what I got initially:

OFFSETDICTkeyUno=5
OFFSETDICTkeyDos=4
OFFSETDICTkeyTres=17
OFFSETDICTkeyQuatro=21
keyToLookup="keyQuatro"
value="$(eval echo '$OFFSETDICT'${keyToLookup})"
echo $value
>     21

So, that’s ridiculous.  Basically, the values are set in code with the dictionary name “OFFSETDICT”, and the key as whatever comes after the name {keyUno, keyTres, …}.  Then the value line builds a variable lookup and executes it.  That’s pretty lazy of me to write it like that, so here’s a function (a Bash function - so terrible).