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Makes you look busy

Terminal - Makes you look busy
alias busy='my_file=$(find /usr/include -type f | sort -R | head -n 1); my_len=$(wc -l $my_file | awk "{print $1}"); let "r = $RANDOM % $my_len" 2>/dev/null; vim +$r $my_file'
2010-03-09 21:48:41
User: busybee
Functions: alias awk find head sort vim wc
14
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Makes you look busy

This makes an alias for a command named 'busy'. The 'busy' command opens a random file in /usr/include to a random line with vim. Drop this in your .bash_aliases and make sure that file is initialized in your .bashrc.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

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What others think

i like the idea :D

Comment by RanyAlbeg 26 weeks and 2 days ago

Fails here due to sort not knowing -R.

CentOS 5.3

sort (GNU coreutils) 5.97

Comment by DaveQB 26 weeks and 1 day ago

It always takes me to the last line because the braces in the awk statement aren't properly escaped for zsh by the doublequotes. The following works for me:

my_file=$(find /usr/include -type f | sort -R | head -n 1); my_len=$(wc -l $my_file | awk '{print $1}'); let "r = $RANDOM % $my_len" 2>/dev/null; vim +$r $my_file
Comment by tremby 26 weeks ago

Oops -- actually, in the alias statement as you wrote it it does in fact work fine. Interesting. My post above applied when using the body of the command alone on the commandline.

Comment by tremby 26 weeks ago

Wow. That takes me back to the days when video games had "boss keys" that would show a fake spreadsheet or some such business-baloney. Of course, if you're at a command line, as this command assumes, I'm not quite sure what you'd want to hide from your boss... ASCII art Pr0n?

Comment by hackerb9 25 weeks and 6 days ago

you must add a backspace to escape the $ character in the awk argument and make it work:

alias busy='my_file=$(find /usr/include -type f | sort -R | head -n 1); my_len=$(wc -l $my_file | awk "{print $1}"); let "r = $RANDOM % $my_len" 2>/dev/null; vim +$r $my_file'
Comment by fsilveira 13 weeks and 2 days ago

you must add a backspace to escape the $ character in the awk argument and make it work:

alias busy='my_file=$(find /usr/include -type f | sort -R | head -n 1); my_len=$(wc -l $my_file | awk "{print \$1}"); let "r = $RANDOM % $my_len" 2>/dev/null; vim +$r $my_file'
Comment by fsilveira 13 weeks and 2 days ago

sorry, it works either way, but my fix makes the vim line jump work as expected by the author.

(is there a way to remove my first reply?)

Comment by fsilveira 13 weeks and 2 days ago

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