Github Code Search is an indispensable part of my workflow that I don’t think gets mentioned enough.
There are so many great projects out there that solve or may help you solve what you are currently working on.
I was looking to write a shell script to invoke the caffeinate command on macOS to keep my system awake.
The default, this tool runs an blocks forever in the terminal while it does its job.
I wanted to manage it in the background.
I thought through the beginnings of how I might do that myself.
Something like
ps aux | grep caffeinate
# if running, kill pid
# if not running, start
I plugged ps aux | grep caffeinate into Code Search and found several different approaches for what I had in mind.
A language model does pretty well too.
#!/bin/bash
# This script toggles the 'caffeinate' command on macOS.
# Check if caffeinate is running
pid=$(pgrep caffeinate)
if [ -z "$pid" ]; then
# If caffeinate is not running, start it
caffeinate &
echo "caffeinate started"
else
# If caffeinate is running, kill it
kill $pid
echo "caffeinate stopped"
fi
I suppose the language model wins today, for introducing me to pgrep.
I settled on the following because I like one-liners:
pgrep caffeinate > /dev/null && kill $(pgrep caffeinate) || caffeinate -dim &