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Saturday, November 25, 2006

Keeping Up with Packages

I like to follow the OpenBSD advice that it's better
to install their binary packages, rather than build
programs from ports, unless there's a particular need
not covered by a package. That being said, I wanted
an easy way to keep abreast of package updates and
additions without subscribing to any more mail lists
than I already have, so I kludged up a script to run
from a cronjob every morning. Then I could check it
when I was up and about. Some folks read the paper.
Not me. ;) The script runs something like this:

----------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
# just a script to update my package index file
# without a bunch of typing! ;)
#
wget ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/i386/
index.txt && mv index.txt index.`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"`.txt
#
----------------------------------------------------

Wget fetches the file index.txt, and then uses mv with
the date function to create a unique file that can be
diffed against older versions. Simple but effective.
Too bad the funnies don't come with it. ;)

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