I was introduced to the bash builtin /dev/tcp by warg the other day on x-tab#chat. He explained a basic use of this device by demonstrating how to download wget’s compressed tarball. The download process itself can be done with pure bash, but some post-processing of the downloaded file must be done to remove HTTP headers. I document warg’s application of /dev/tcp here because I found the idea fascinating and want this documentation for myself .

Connecting and Downloading

To read about the /dev/tcp builtin for yourself, check out the following:

$ info '(bash) Redirections'

With the exec line we initiate the connection, allocating a file descriptor and storing the numeic file descriptor into the HTTP_FD variable. Then, with the echo line, we send an HTTP request through the descriptor to the server. After sending the request, we process the server’s response with the sed line which skips over the HTTP headers sent by the server and stows the results into wget-latest.tar.gz. Note that this last command will sit around for a while. It is with this command that the builk of the data transfer is performed. And, since you’re using shell redirections to download the file, you cannot see the download progress. Instead, wait for the command to complete. This also involves waiting for the server to time out your connection since it supports pipelining. After this process is completed, the wget-latest.tar.gz file is as your disposal.

$ WGET_HOSTNAME='ftp.gnu.org'
$ exec {HTTP_FD}<>/dev/tcp/${WGET_HOSTNAME}/80
$ echo -ne 'GET /gnu/wget/wget-latest.tar.gz HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '\
    ${WGET_HOSTNAME}'\r\nUser-Agent: '\
    'bash/'${BASH_VERSION}'\r\n\r\n'  >&${HTTP_FD}
$ sed -e '1,/^.$/d' <&${HTTP_FD} >wget-latest.tar.gz

Now you have a wget source tarball on your machine. As long as you have tar and a compiler on the machine, you are well on your way to downloading stuff using a self-compiled wget. In the commands above, you may replace “gz” with “bz2″ or “lzma” for smaller downloads if the machine you’re using has bzip2 or xz-utils installed. And, of course, it should not be too hard to repurpose the above code to download a particular version of wget or even a completely unrelated software package.

Please feel free to point out problems with this approach or give pointers on porting this to other environments .

As a Gentoo user, I value the ability to compile and install things from source. Yet I don’t want the messiness of a completely manual “distribution” such as LFS. Yet I feel like I’m missing out of a big chunk of the GNU/Linux experience when I have to tell people that I’ve only ever used Gentoo. Also, if one wants to make his package available from multiple distributions, he may find more success if he is able to facilitate creation of the binary packages for these other distributions.

Thus, I have committed sys-apps/pacman into Sunrise. I still have to get permission to commit a few fixes (hopefully by tomorrow). Also, archlinux’s take on mirrorselect, reflector, has been committed but awaits review. When these things get through, the following may actually be worth something:

I have attempted to write a guide to setting up an archlinux chroot on Gentoo. Don’t actually try the guide until about a week from now, when my stuff clears review, of course . However, in the meantime, I would gladly accept:

• Technical criticisms
• (if you are tommy[d], please ignore the following) Alerts about the misuse of the apostrophe or general grammatical problems
• Documentation storage format suggestions — I suppose it would be a good exercise for me to learn docbook someday. Should I start now?

bug 293921. I’m afraid that I’ve misrepresented flameeyes to some people and even vapier feels he needs to qualify my overly-general statements :-/. But I have a lot of respect for tommy, who insists that ltdl.la isn’t a good idea. But for the sake of portage-multilib, he’s wavering a little .

Gentoo multilib-overlay—please try the portage-multilib branch (see topic).

Recently, however, I have wondered about the validity of the phrase “kind of”:

<ohnobinki>     and he hangs out on #bangladesh kind've
<ohnobinki>     oh, btw
<zimjimmy>      hm
<ohnobinki>     I've discovered that the whole time I've been using kindeof when I should've used kind've
<zimjimmy>      ...?
<zimjimmy>      why would there be an e
<zimjimmy>      ?
<ohnobinki>     kindoef is wrong, kind've is correct
<ohnobinki>     idk
<ohnobinki>     I wondered that myself
<zimjimmy>      i never noticed you do that
<zimjimmy>      oh
<zimjimmy>      you mean kind of?
<ohnobinki>     no
<ohnobinki>     kind've=>kind have
<ohnobinki>     I kind have like pizza
<ohnobinki>     right?
<zimjimmy>      that... makes no sense
<ohnobinki>     kind of like pizza makes less sense
<zimjimmy>      um
<zimjimmy>      well
<zimjimmy>      i think it's an idiom
<ohnobinki>     maybe kind've liked pizza=> I kind have liked pizza b4
<ohnobinki>     ugh
<HonestBot>      get over it
<ohnobinki>     only idiots use idiom
<ohnobinki>     *idioms 
<ohnobinki>     honestbot: no!

—2009/05/13 on #protofusion

Which reminds me—I used to spell “kind of” as “kindeof”. I thought “kind of” should be merged into one word by the agency that controls English as the W3C controls XHTML.

Of course, I was wrong to say that “kind’ve” is the correct notation for “kind of”. I recently realized that “have” doesn’t fit into sentences containing “kind of”. If such a sentence exists, it would probably change its meaning; “have” can not act as a drop-in replacement for “of” in the phrase “kind of”:

<ohnobinki> I think I'm wrong about ``kind've''
<normaldotcom> lol
<normaldotcom> waddayamena
<normaldotcom> ?
<ohnobinki> well
<ohnobinki> when people say ``it is kind of green'', they mean ``It is a kind of green''
<ohnobinki> i.e., ``it is greenish'' or ``a modified green'', which would be a ``type of green''
<normaldotcom> lol yeah
<ohnobinki> and ``have'' doesn't fit into there are all
<ohnobinki> so ``kind've''=>``kind have'' doesn't work
<ohnobinki> wp article  C
<ohnobinki> ?
<normaldotcom> yeah
<normaldotcom> lol sure

—2009/08/29 on #protofusion