Dist::Zilla vs xenoterracide

I solved my problem with Dist::Zilla. If you agree with me that you should be able to install from your git repository, without requiring your users to have Dist::Zilla installed here's one way of doing it.

First install Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CopyTo. Now Edit your dist.ini. Most people probably use one of the Dist::Zilla bundles. Assuming you use Basic here's what you do. Now as you can see we use GatherDir to get where the source should come from and CopyTo to tell additional places where the output of the script should be sent to. It will still send to the default directory, that's ok, you can just ignore those files. add . to your repo (making sure to add the default generated location to your ignore list) and commit. now if dzil changes any of these you can see it.

If you wanted to with git you could use a git-new-workdir and another branch and copy to it and commit this stuff to a different branch. I haven't found another way to do it in a seperate branch yet, although someone said it's possible.

P.S. 1
If dzil ever gives you some vague error about some util file... run dzil clean I don't know why it was doing that to me occasionally through all this but I spent like 8 hours thinking my config was screwed up when the directory just needed to be cleaned.

P.S. 2 Thanks to rjbs for putting up with my asininity while I asked a lot of questions and ranted.

P.S 3
My stuff is 99% working now... I just have a problem where my licensing is wrong :( I've set it to Perl_5 but it really should be GPL3 and Artistic2 (or whatever those are in Software::License).

cat that displays tabs at 4 spaces

So in the tabs vs spaces war I'm squarely on the side of use tabs. tabs have meaning. tabs allow people to set there editor's to whatever space display width their eyes are comfortable with as opposed to what yours are (e.g. you like 2 spaces I like 4). However, I've heard the argument what about when you cat the file, etc. Well it is actually a bit annoying... so let's fix it.

my requirements when I type cat foo if foo has tabs they will be displayed at 4 spaces, and I can still pass all cli options as I normally would to cat. To do this we're going to create a shell function called etcat()
I'd like to note, that in order for this to work you must use either an absolute path or a call to env cat because otherwise the shell will attempt to call cat as a recursive function. I put this in my .alias file and sourced it.

you can now put alias cat="etcat" in your aliases file, or run etcat. This is to protect you from any problems that could otherwise be caused by overriding cat in scripts you don't control (not that I'm actually aware of any for this function).

P.S. Thanks to @greybot on #bash for the incantation as I was having trouble with the "$@"

UPDATE:
changed name of function.

Adding a new group to an open shell without logging in and out

Most Unix users believe it's impossible to add a group that was recently added to your user account without logging in and logging out. If you're running X and need to give your gui new permissions (like dolphin/konqueoror) this may be true, for the most part. I don't know how to change it for those processes. However, if you need to change it for a shell prompt it's easy. You merely execute the command newgrp in an open shell prompt and that prompt will now be loaded with the new group. I believe it also changes the default group that shell is running as. So if you run newgrp http; touch test.txt your file will be created with the group http instead of whatever your default is. You can change your group back to the default by using the sg command.

iptables browsing samba shares

NOTE: this assumes that you've read my previous post on basic iptables setup on the desktop

So I just spent the longest time trying to determine what ports I needed to browse and use samba shares. The sad answer is it's just one.


iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 137 -j ACCEPT


the catch with all the information I found with google was that most of it was for samba servers. I didn't want that. I just want to be able to browse my roommates network shares, and download from them. None of the information google provided suggested I need to allow the source port on the other end.