Planning the day on the CLI with tsort

Tim Chase — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 12:48:08 GMT

I had a bunch of items on the todo list for the day and wanted to arrange them in order, but I needed to certain items before others:

Drop donations off at the resale store, but can't do that before 10:00 when they open
Get the daughter ready for soccer camp before dropping her off
Drop the daughter off at camp before taking paperwork up to her school
cut the son's hair before he takes a shower and cleans his bathroom
pick up daughter at camp after she's started camp (duh) and before 10:45
take the kids to the library after picking up daughter at camp
for obvious reasons, 8:30 → 8:45 → 9:00 → 10:00 → 10:30 → 10:45

So I expressed this in a file where each row contains "X needs to come before Y":

$ cat todo.txt
10:00 resale
resale 10:30
sunblock take_to_camp
pack_snack take_to_camp
pack_water take_to_camp
pack_towel take_to_camp
take_to_camp 8:30
8:30 soccer_camp
soccer_camp 8:45 
soccer_camp paperwork
8:45 home
home 9:00
paperwork home
home cut_hair
home clean_bathroom
home shower
cut_hair shower
cut_hair pick_up
shower pick_up
clean_bathroom pick_up
cut_hair clean_bathroom
clean_bathroom 10:00
10:45 pick_up
8:30 8:45 
8:45 9:00 
9:00 10:00 
10:00 10:30 
10:30 10:45 
pick_up library

Now it just became a matter of passing these requirements to tsort

$ tsort todo.txt
pack_towel
pack_water
pack_snack
sunblock
take_to_camp
8:30
soccer_camp
paperwork
8:45
home
cut_hair
9:00
shower
clean_bathroom
10:00
resale
10:30
10:45
pick_up
library

to sift them into the required order of my todo list for the day.

Tim's blog (Posts about tsort)

Planning the day on the CLI with tsort