Pragmatism in today's world

Small scripts for repetitive tasks

One thing that I like to do is write a script for seemingly trivial things that I do more than once. I do this as it turns out that I end up needing them again. One example is a pair of script I use when testing rst2pdf. rst2pdf's tests work by creating a PDF and then comparing this to a reference PDF. If they are different, then the test has failed. When a test fails,… continue reading.

Set a file's created date from YAML front matter in macOS

I have a set of Markdown files with YAML front matter that contains a created property containing the date that the file was created. Due to various machinations, the file creation date no longer matches this date, so I thought I'd fix this. Setting created date of a file On macOS, to change a file's creation date you use SetFile which is installed as part of Xcode. Irritatingly, it uses US format dates: SetFile -d… continue reading.