I use a command called “hc12-console” to connect to 68HC12 microcontrollers over a serial port. The command takes two arguments: the name of a microcontroller to connect to and a file to load. I only have two microcontrollers called “dragon1″ and “dragon2″. Therefore, I want to be able to tab complete the first argument to one of those values only. The second argument should be the name of a file that ends in “.load”.

I do this with a function that checks the argument number and then completes it based on a specified list or by limiting the types of files that will be listed.

_hc12console ()
{
	local cur

	COMPREPLY=()
	cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}

	# First argument completes with either dragon1 or dragon2
	if [[ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ]] ; then
		COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "dragon1 dragon2" -- $cur ) )
		return 0
	fi

	# Second argument completes with only files matching *.load
	if [[ $COMP_CWORD -eq 2 ]] ; then
		COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -f -X '!*.load' -- $cur ) )
		return 0
	fi

	# All other arguments will not auto-complete
	return 0
}
complete -F _hc12console hc12-console

I added the script above to a file that my bashrc sources. It associates the function with the shell command, and then instead of manually typing out:

hc12-console dragon1 file.load <enter>

I can type:

hc12<tab> <tab>1 <tab> <enter>

I use OWA Sync to get all of my calendar information onto my Ubuntu desktop. I recently rediscovered the Little Brother’s Database and decided to make my OWA contacts available in Mutt on my Ubuntu desktop, too. (I used lbdb to make my contacts in Apple Address Book available to Mutt when I was still using Mac OS X as my primary operating system.)

The OWA Sync website has a decent explanation of creating a owaSyncrc file. After I created that, I wrote a script that runs as a cron job.

#! /bin/bash

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/

/usr/local/bin/owaSync.kit -update

cat $HOME/.owa/Calendar/*.ics > $HOME/.calendar.ics
cat $HOME/.owa/Contacts/*.vcf > $HOME/.contacts.vcf

After a bit of trial and error, I figured out that “/usr/local/bin/” needed to be in the path for the owaSync.kit script to run. After the synchronization is complete, I then concatenate all of the calendar events into a single file and all of the contact cards into a single file. I now have a single calendar file that I can use with PHP iCalendar and a single contacts file that I can use with lbdb. It requires a fairly simple rc file that looks something like this:

METHODS="$METHODS m_vcf m_muttalias"

VCF_FILES="$HOME/.contacts.vcf"
MUTTALIAS_FILES="$HOME/.mutt/aliases"

I add “m_vcf” and “m_muttaliases” to the “METHODS” and then I specify the locations of my OWA contacts and my Mutt aliases. Now when I launch Mutt, I can query for addresses that I downloaded from OWA.

zac@dakara:~$ scp ~/.environment/bash/bash_profile lansky:~/.bash_profile
bash_profile                                  100%  120     0.1KB/s   00:00
zac@dakara:~$ scp ~/.environment/bash/bashrc lansky:~/.bashrc
lost connection

What happened? My .bash_profile sources my .bashrc, but since I hadn’t yet replaced the .bashrc, it still sources my .bash_profile. That means infinite loop and that I am an idiot. SSH, rsync, and scp are all broken. There is no way to remove or replace either of those files without another account. I guess it’s time to open a support ticket at DreamHost.

The moral of the story is to always be careful how you source those files. I usually try to keep an SSH session open on the remote machine when I modify those files in case I break login, but this time I didn’t. A few searches didn’t reveal any solutions. I’d love to know if someone has a way of resolving this without access to another account on the remote machine.

# Source global definitions
[ -f /etc/bashrc ]      && source /etc/bashrc
[ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ] && source /etc/bash.bashrc
# enable programmable completion features
if [ -z "$BASH_COMPLETION" \
    -a -r ~/.configuration/bash/bash_completion.caliban ]; then
    BASH_COMPLETION=~/.configuration/bash/bash_completion.caliban
    source $BASH_COMPLETION
fi

First, I source the global definitions, Ubuntu uses /etc/bashrc, and Fedora uses /etc/bash.bashrc. After that, if the bash_completion script was already sourced, $BASH_COMPLETION will be set. I check to see if it is zero length (-z) and then source my own copy of it if it is. Now I have advanced bash completion on both Ubuntu and Fedora.