[PhillyOnRails] Sparehand

[Mat Schaffer]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 1:39 PM, Mark Chadwick wrote:

> Mat,
>
> How about returning the favor, and giving us a quick overview of  
> sparehand?  It certainly looks pretty neat thus far.  Where are you  
> looking to take this code / looking for any contributors?

Happy to!  Basically I'm looking to make a collection of system- 
administration type tools that are usable from both ruby and the  
command line.  The first is comment_block / Sparehand::CommentBlock.   
Which basically comments or uncomments blocks of a text file  
delimited by
#BEGIN <identifier>
#END <identifier>

The comment character can be swapped out, but it has to be a whole- 
line comment.  /* */ style comments are not yet supported.

The next to follow will be something that Ryan and I have been  
working on which monitors routing changes and calls corresponding  
ruby blocks when it sees the changes.

This is basically all growing out of a need that Ryan and I have to  
fiddle with things like /etc/hosts when changing network segments.   
Although Ryan is also starting to look at using it to signal system  
backups when it notices that you're on your home network, etc...   
We've even had some discussions about trying to script a simple  
system administrator agent that could restart services or notify you  
when things didn't look right.

I'll gladly accept any submissions or ideas for new tools.  The main  
requirement is that it any core functionality be available both via  
CLI script and ruby calls.

-Mat