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CLI Tricks: Full justify text with awk

Tim Chase

I wanted to do some full-justification of text. So a little awk later, I could set the desired width and pipe to justify it. 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {c = "COLUMNS" in ENVIRON ? ENVIRON["COLUMNS"] : 80}
{
    if (NF > 1) {
        s = $0
        wc = split(s, a)
        gsub(FS, "", s)
        totalfill = c - length(s)
        fill = totalfill / (wc - 1)
        intfill = int(fill)
        errdelta = fill - intfill
        err = 0.5
        printf("%s", a[1])
        for (i=2; i<=length(a); i++) {
            width = intfill
            err += errdelta
            if (err >= 1) {
                ++width
                err -= 1
            }
            printf("%*s%s", width, " ", a[i])
        }
        printf("\n")
    } else print
}
full-justify.awk

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CLI Tricks: Freeze dance with cmus

Tim Chase

Our daughter wanted to "freeze dance" (music plays, stopping at random intervals, at which the dancing kids freeze in place until the music resumes). So what is a geek dad to do? Load up a playlist of kids' music in cmus, start playing the music, and let the shell randomly freeze and resume the music 

while true ; do sleep $(( $RANDOM % 15 + 5)) ; cmus-remote -u ; sleep 4; cmus-remote -u ;  done

This does as sleep for some random interval between 5 and 20 seconds, then does as sleep for 4 seconds before unpausing the music.

You could do something similar with mpd/mpc if you prefer them.