Looking Out To Sea

At work I keep all my different tasks in separate screen sessions. Each session has a friendly name which makes sense to me, but also has a variable which captures the bug ID. There are various command line tools I interact with that require the ID so it’s easier if I set it once and don’t need to copy-paste it in each time.

After seeing this post on keeping a “lab book” I realised I could make extra use of this environment variable that I already used.

I save this file in ~/bin/note and I can write quick scribbles to myself in whichever window I’m using and it will go to the correct “book”:

#!/bin/bash
 
LOGDIR=$HOME/labbook
 
if [ "" == "$BUGID" ]
then LOGFILE=$LOGDIR/GENERAL.log
else LOGFILE=$LOGDIR/$BUGID.log
fi
 
if [ "" == "$*" ]
then
    echo "No log written: message empty"
else
    DATE=$( date +%Y%m%d-%H:%M )
    mkdir -p $LOGDIR
    echo $DATE $* >> $LOGFILE
fi

It’s not complex but I think it will do wonders for how much I remember to document about my work from day to day.

Update: I learned today the delight of this one-liner which prints everything I’ve done today in order. It’s quite pleasing.

$ grep -h `date +%Y%m%d` labbook/* | sort