A while back, I was tasked with automating a very lengthy installation process, which consisted of downloading a big number of open source packages, configuring, compiling and installing them. Being the programmer I am, I ended up writing a sort of bash library with functions that made it easier to write and maintain such installation scripts. The installation scripts are easy to read and most of the tedious, repetitive work is done under the hood.

When I’m automating processes on a unix system, I often end up with scripts that will generate loads of output. To make it easier to scan for important keywords, I wrote a little bash script that colours the received output. And after much deliberation, I decided to name it `colour’.

Just successfully compiled gnuplot 4.2 patchlevel 0 on my Mac yesterday. Went smooth, found locally installed (in $HOME) readline and all the rest, realized we’re on a Mac here and even set ‘terminal’ to ‘aqua’ by default (had Aquaterm installed before that). To get dashed lines in my plot, all I need to do is this:
set terminal aqua dashed
More details about this:
help term aqua