md5(1) and cal(1)

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 05:35:45PM -0800, David Allen wrote:
> 1.  Why doesn't cal(1) hilight the current day?  Hell, some days I'm
> not even sure what day or week it is, so after typing 'cal', I have to
> type in 'date', and then sit there for a few seconds to interpret what
> I'm looking at.  Of course, that isn't always successful, so I
> typically end up reaching for my mouse and hilight the date manually.
> But after doing that I'm just as annoyed by not knowing the date as
> I'm annoyed by the behavior of the cal utility and the extra work I'm
> forced to do.

If I don't actually know the date, I typically use the date command to
find out.  I use cal to do things like check dates of other days in the
preceding or following weeks.


> 
> 2.  Why doesn't md5(1) have a "check" option?  Seems to me requiring a
> manual inspection is error-prone at best, and makes scripting unecessarily
> complicated.

I use diff to check the output of md5 against a known string.  For
instance, if I have a known hash value in a file hash.txt, I might first
get the md5 output into another file called hash2.txt:

    md5 -q hash2.txt

. . . then diff the two files:

    diff hash.txt hash2.txt

The thing that bothers me about diff is that, even though it's often
described as a "string comparison" utility, it doesn't actually compare
strings -- it compares files that *contain* strings.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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