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I'm writing this post simply for the purpose of reminding myself of how I built my first shell script... I'm not sure if admitting this is a positive or negative thing. Writing shell scripts has never truly been a part of my day-to-day work, but understood the core concepts and what they are able to do.

I decided to write this shell script to perform a rather easy task: cycle through all CSS and JS files in a directory and change a string within each file with the value that was entered into the shell script. The main use of this script, for my use, is to update path references in these files.

# Script Name: CSS/JS Path Replacer #
# Description: Iterates through all directories to replace strings found in CSS and JS files. #
#               Place this bash script in the directory where the files reside. #
#               For example: /resources. #

# Take the search string.
read -p "Enter the search string: " search

# Take the replace string.
read -p "Enter the replace string: " replace

FILES="./**/*.min.css ./**/*.css ./**/*.min.js ./**/*.js"

for f in $FILES
do
	echo "Processing $f file..."
  
	sed -i "s/${search//\//\\/}/${replace//\//\\/}/g" $f
done

$SHELL

To carry out a replace within each file, I'm using the sed command:

sed -i "s/old-value/new-value/g" filename.txt

This command tells sed to find all occurrences of "old-value" and replace with "new-value" in a file called "filename.txt". As the main purpose of the script is to update path references within CSS and JS files, I had to escape forward slashes in the "search" and "replace" variables when parsed to the sed command.

Bash script in use:

Enter the search string: /surinder-v1/resources
Enter the replace string: /surinder-v2/resources
Processing ./css/site.min.css file...
Processing ./css/site.css file...
Processing ./css/site.min.css file...
Processing ./css/styleguide.css file...
Processing ./js/global.min.js file...
Processing ./js/global.min.js file...

Once the script has processed all the files, any reference to "/surinder-v1/resources" will be replaced with "/surinder-v2/resources".

Further useful information about using the "sed" command can be found in the following post: How to use sed to find and replace text in files in Linux / Unix shell.

Microsoft’s new command-line tool, PowerShell has been out for quite a few years now and I thought today will be the day I would start using it. I needed to write a script that would move n number of files from one directory to another. This job seemed a perfect fit for PowerShell.

#Get 'n' number of files
$FileLimit = 10 

#Destination for files
$DropDirectory = "C:\Drop\"

$PickupDirectory = Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Pickup\"

$Counter = 0
foreach ($file in $PickupDirectory)
{
    if ($Counter -ne $FileLimit)
    {
        $Destination = $DropDirectory+$file.Name

        Write-Host $file.FullName #Output file fullname to screen
        Write-Host $Destination   #Output Full Destination path to screen
        
        Move-Item $file.FullName -destination $Destination
        $Counter++
    }  
}

From the get go, I was really impressed with the flexibility of the scripting language. This is where command line fails. It is sufficient for simple tasks but not so much for complex jobs.

As you can see from the code above, I can implement complex operations that supports variables, conditional statements, loops (while, do, for, and foreach), and that’s just the start. I don’t know why I hadn’t used PowerShell sooner. If I didn’t have the option to use PowerShell, I would have probably created a C# service or executable to do the exact same thing. Time saver!

Since PowerShell is built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps control and automate the administration of the operating system and applications that run on Windows. So if you are a C# programmer, you should feel comfortable in writing PowerShell scripts. All you need to be aware of is syntax differences when declaring variables and keywords.

To end with, I will quote an amusing forum post I found when researching the difference between good ol’ Command Prompt and PowerShell:

“PowerShell has a default blue background and Command Prompt has a default black background.”